Drinking for charity

Here in Rioja, people don’t pay much attention to the typical macroeconomic indicators such as unemployment, housing starts and car sales.  The talk of the town is how full the bars and restaurants are.  Judging from these numbers, Rioja seems to be doing just fine, although my friends in the restaurant business tell me that Mondays and Tuesdays are slower than usual because people burn the candle at both ends from Thursday through Sunday and need a rest.

One of my friends, the owner of the Cafetería Monterrey (which happens to be next door to our apartment building), a wine writer and I usually have lunch together once a week at a nearby bistro, El Lagar.  A few weeks ago, Roberto, the owner of the bar, informed us of an idea he had to get more traffic in his place on Mondays and Tuesdays:  a series of wine tastings whose proceeds go to a local soup kitchen.

Casimiro (the journalist) and I thought the idea was terrific and wondered why no one else had thought of it.  Here’s how it works.

Every other Monday and Tuesday the bar invites a winery to give a sit-down, tutored tasting to 20 customers.  Each taster pays 50 euro cents to taste three wines. The winery and the bar each put up 50 cents, so the soup kitchen gets 1,50 euros a taster, or 30 euros a tasting.  In addition, there’s space at the bar so others can listen in on the winemaker’s comments, even though they pay full price for their glasses (here a white costs 1,50 and a crianza 2 euros a glass, so it’s still not expensive).

The selected winery is the house wine for the two weeks that the promotion lasts, so there’s an economic incentive for wineries to participate.

This simple promotion achieves four goals:  more people visit the bar on normally slow evenings, customers can learn about the featured wine and improve their general knowledge about Rioja, relatively unknown wines get some well-needed exposure, and last but certainly not least, the profits go to a worthy cause, because there are lots of needy people here.

I hope this promotion goes on for a long time.  With over 600 wineries in Rioja, there’s certainly enough supply for years to come.  And, given the Spaniards’ propensity to copy others’ ideas (one of the most famous sayings in Spanish is “¡Que inventen ellos!” -Let others invent it- by the early 20th century essayist and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno), maybe the idea of teaching the locals about Rioja wine will catch on!  They need it.

The name game

Once upon a time there was a young winemaker in Rioja who wanted to bottle a batch of wine.  He went to his bank and asked for a loan.  The loan officer refused, explaining that wine was a risky business.  That same officer would have gladly given the young winemaker a mortgage loan for 120% of the value of his house, but that’s a different story.

Faced with this situation, the winemaker asked his friends to lend him the money, but not before creating a brand for his wine:  ‘Gran Cerdo’ (big fat pig), an allusion to his banker (and all others), telling the story on the back label calling him a ‘fat, sweaty suit’ and putting a picture of a pig on the front label.

Revenge is sweet.

This story is true and illustrates the point that to make an impression in the wine business today you not only need to tell a good story but also grab people’s attention with your label.

The new world is running rings around the old.  While the Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and Californians are the talk of the trade for their zany brand names and eye-catching labels featuring exotic reptiles and marsupials as well as insults (Fat Bastard) and plays on words (Goats do Roam (Côtes du Rhône, get it?), the old world is obsessed with titles of nobility, castles and the names of their vineyards.  In Spain, the only departure from this trend is a dizzying list of pseudo-Latin names such as Aurus, Apricus, Irius, Infinitus, Gaudium, Unnum, Zenus and the unforgettable Tremendus.

Finding an attractive brand name is a hard job and registering it to protect it from usurpation even harder.  There are a number of companies specializing in brand generation that use computers to come up with pronounceable names.

Once you have a name you have to make sure that it doesn’t mean anything offensive in another language (I especially remember the Chevrolet Nova, a flop in Spanish-speaking countries because ‘no va’ means ‘it doesn’t run’).

Two of my favorite examples of brands that wouldn’t work in Spain are the chianti classico brand ‘Cabreo’ that means ‘temper tantrum’ and the New Zealand winery Te Mata, ‘it kills you’. And I love ‘Gran Caus’ from the Penedés, south of Barcelona, whose name sounds like ‘huge chaos’ in Spanish. Maybe that’s why it’s successful.

In Rioja, as far as I know, only one company, Vintae, has really gone out on a limb to use eye-catching names and labels as marketing tools. This strategy really seems to work. Check out their website: http://vintae.com/en/porfolio/porfolio/

I hope Rioja wineries let their hair down a little more with their brand names and packaging.  Wine is a tough business but it doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun.

(Picture credit:  reginarodriguezsirvent.com)

 

 

Marqués de Murrieta – the old and the new

I’ve mentioned many times that even though Rioja is a big wine producing area, there are surprisingly few opportunities to learn about wine here, unless you go to a winery, where you take your chances running into a police checkpoint to get a breathalyzer test. What’s the fun in going to a winery if you can’t have a few glasses of wine?

One regular event within the Logroño city limits where there’s little or no risk of meeting the cops is the wine and food dinner organized by the Cofradía del Vino de Rioja (Rioja Wine Brotherhood) at the Kabanova restaurant. The December event was hosted by Bodegas Marqués de Murrieta.

Marqués de Murrieta is one of the historic Rioja bodegas, founded by Luciano de Murrieta in the early 1850s.  According to the winemaker, the very talented María Vargas, in 1852 its wines were recognized in Cuba as coming from the Rioja region.

The winery is located in the middle of a 300 hectare estate just east of Logroño on the Zaragoza road.  It’s been closed to visitors for several years while undergoing an extensive renovation and lots of people are excited about the bodegas’ reopening, according to María “some time in 2012”. Ah, the mystery…

I used to visit the winery all the time in the 1980s and vividly remember it as a place with bright yellow sand floors (bullfight fans call it albero), very old oak vats and barrels and row after row of cement niches holding ancient vintages, some of which dated back to the 19th century.

I hope you’ve learned by now that traditional Rioja was a blend of Rioja’s classic red grapes (tempranillo, garnacha, mazuelo and graciano), with a healthy dollop of viura and malvasía to increase the wine’s acidity to help it age more gracefully.  The young wines were aged for years in old oak barrels which had long lost their ability to interact with the outside air, so it could be said that the barrel aging (very slow oxidation) and bottle aging (reduction, that is, no contact with air) processes took place in the same container.  As a matter of fact, traditional Riojas were bottled just before shipment because they didn’t need time in the bottle to improve their drinkability.

Another characteristic of traditional Rioja was that reds and whites were made exactly the same way – with long aging in barrel.  I remember being given two glasses of wine, one red and one white by Jesús Marrodán, Murrieta’s legendary winemaker, with instructions to taste each of them with my eyes closed.  I was then asked which one was red and which white.  I couldn’t tell them apart! It wasn’t me; nobody could!

The Murrieta family sold the winery to Vicente Cebrián, Count of Creixell, a Galician businessman, in 1983.  He passed away suddenly in 1996, leaving the business to his widow and two twenty-something children.

The family began at once to redesign the wines.  I remember attending a wine auction in London a short time later and was surprised by a new wine, Dalmau, a huge departure from the style the winery was known for.  At that time I had my doubts about the direction the winery was taking.  It was a time when ‘modern’ Riojas were all about power, defined by high alcohol, inky color, new oak and in most cases, overripe grapes.  It was only later that winemakers began to give elegance more prominence in these modern wines.

The recent winemaker’s dinner showed that Murrieta had received the message loud and clear.  It was one of the best wine and food events I had ever attended.

The menu was:

Shrimp croquettes and sautéed pineapples/Pazo de Barrantes 2010 (D.O. Rías Baixas)

→  the combination of acidity and sweetness of the pineapple was a perfect   match for the elegant, complex fruit of the albariño grape.

Grilled scallops with wild mushrooms au gratin/Capellanía white reserva 2006, barrel fermented (D.O. Ca. Rioja)

→  the scallops and mushroom dish was full of flavor and texture that was complemented perfectly by both the fresh acidity  and weight of the aged white Capellanía.

Cod brandade/Marqués de Murrieta reserva 2005

 →  Cod and red Rioja is one of the most popular pairings in northern Spain.  The reserva, which for me showed both traditional (a blend of several varieties, stewed fruit, American oak) and modern characteristics (firm, ripe tannins) stood up well to the hearty cod, potato and garlic dish.

Stewed Oxtail/Dalmau reserva 2005

 →  Here we had a powerful rich meat dish that needed a powerful yet elegant wine to match.  The Dalmau was perfect.

 Entrecôte/Castillo de Ygay gran reserva 2004

→  After the oxtail, the steak was almost an anticlimax. I would have changed the order of the last two dishes  The Ygay gran reserva was a classic, with subtle aromas of stewed fruit and high acidity that didn’t overpower the meat, which was served very rare.

When we left the dinner we agreed that we would remember these pairings when asked in the future about food and wine in Rioja.

I was talking about the dinner to a friend the other day. I mentioned that in a way it was a pity that Murrieta had decided to make more modern wines, in a sense walking away from 160 years of history.  My friend pointed out that Rafael López de Heredia, the founder of Viña Tondonia, considered himself a revolutionary in his time and that it was always important to innovate.

In this context, Vicente Cebrián has done the right thing.  As times change, so do wine styles.  With Murrieta you can taste both the old and the new in the different wines made by the winery.

Traveling the back roads of Sweden

 

the Alingsas potato

There are two places in the world where my heart beats a little faster when I arrive there – Sweden and Pamplona. 

For fifteen years I visited Sweden several times a year to promote Rioja with Munskänkarna, the biggest wine club in the world. The name means ‘the mouth tasters’ after the people who tried the food about to be served to the king to see if it had been poisoned. (What a profession!) Swedes have a love affair with Rioja that sadly has diminished with the passage of time, but back in the early 1990s it was one of our top three markets.  In fact, in 1994, it was number one. Most Rioja was sold in the big cities: Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö so we decided that we had to get the word out to the rest of the country.

The deal with Munskänkarna was for Rioja to pay for my flight to and from Sweden and transportation within the country while the club paid for the wines, meals and hotels.  I would do a tasting a day in a different city followed by a dinner. This would go on for two weeks. Sometimes I’d rent a car, others, I’d take a bus and sometimes I’d be driven to a gas station or crossroads in the middle of the country to be handed off to the president of the club in the next city.

I can’t begin to describe the enthusiasm the club members showed during the tastings.  Imagine fifty to a hundred people showing up in a small town on a snowy evening with their tasting glasses in a small suitcase or bag to learn about the Riojas the club had prepared for the tasting.  I would tell them about the Rioja region, the history of each winery and the basic characteristics of the wines – vintage year, grape varieties and ageing, but let them describe in their own words the aromas and tastes they experienced.

During these tastings I learned that their way of describing the wines was conditioned by the tastes and smells they were familiar with – very different than mine.  How could I talk to them about a cloudberry or a lingonberry if I’d never eaten one?  It was the most important lesson I learned as a taster – never try to impose your nose and palate on someone else because we all have a different sense of smell and taste.  

After every tasting the president of the club would thank me and give me a typical souvenir the region, most of which now sit on the mantel in our living room.  I especially cherish a small statue of a horse from Dalecarlia, a cluster of grapes made of glass, an Örrefors plate, a small gold potato from Alingsås (more about that later) and believe it or not, a hand saw from the town of Sandviken (from one of the biggest toolmakers, Sandvik – imagine carrying that around for two weeks!)

I always talk about these trips to my Swedish friends who unfailingly tell me that I know their country better than they do. Most people’s knowledge of a foreign country is the capital.  To really know Sweden you have to visit the countryside. It’s drop-dead gorgeous.

Among my memories is being dropped off near a roaring river in the north that bordered a forest destroyed by a fire.  The man who picked me up told me that the fire had taken place fifty years earlier.  There was so little sunlight that the forest couldn’t grow back!

I also remember playing a round of golf at midnight in June, watching the sun go down, only to come up again half an hour later.

I’m writing this while listening to a CD of Abba’s Greatest Hits, which always seems to be popular in our house during the Christmas holidays.  I smile when I remember listening to it on a bus during a blizzard in northern Sweden while watching the ‘watch out for moose’ signs on the side of the road and thinking “it doesn’t get better than this”.

 

Photo credit: earthsky.org

I became so enthusiastic about the country that I even studied Swedish for a couple of years and still prectice whenever I get a chance.  The problem is that Swedes speak English so well that the first time I would make a mistake, the conversation would revert to English!  A warning to the Swedes:  I’m not going to give up!

I always tell my wine economics classes that to promote their products effectively they have to spend time in the market.  My experience in Sweden is a vivid reminder of the truth of that statement

Note:  the statue of the potato is in honor of the agronomist Jonas Alströmer, who convinced Swedish farmers to plant potatoes in the 18th century.  That his home town of Alingsås would honor him by venerating the potato is a tribute to the Swedes’ sense of practicality. 

 

 

Back to the basics

Do you remember your first taste of wine? I do, vividly. It was offered to me when I was around 12 by my best friend’s (now my stepbrother) grandfather, a self-made man of German ancestry who, by dint of hard work had created a paper company from scratch. To instill a sense of hard work and perseverance in his grandson he gave him a kit from which he had to build a model of a four-masted schooner from balsa and other kinds of wood.

One afternoon while I was keeping my friend company, his grandfather stepped from his study with two small glasses of a yellow liquid that he had apparently been drinking. He asked us to take a small sip. It was awful, sweet but at the same time with a bitter taste that totally put me off.

If I hadn’t moved to Spain, this sensation might have defined my attitude toward wine. I know that it has for lots of people. I didn’t drink any wine at all during high school and college because I ran track and cross country. I didn’t turn 21 until my senior year in college and when I did start drinking, my beverage of choice, like everyone else’s, was beer, not wine. I only started to drink wine after I moved to Spain in 1971 because it was plentiful, good and cheap. A glass of ordinary red cost 1 peseta, about 0,6 euro cents. My girlfriend (now my wife) and I could eat and drink all night for less than 100 pesetas (less than 1 euro).

I also vividly remember the simple pleasure of drinking red wine at the dining room table at the boarding house where I lived for six months at the end of 1971. Once in a while the owner would give me an empty bottle and ask me to go around the corner to the local bodega to get it filled from a tank behind the counter. After my wife and I married in 1973 our house wine was Señorío de los Llanos from Valdepeñas that we bought by the three-pack from our local supermarket.

Back in those days before my professional involvement with wine, our attitude toward it was as a simple, tasty accompaniment to lunch, dinner or an outing with friends that got our tongues going. We didn’t ‘taste’, we just drank and enjoyed it.

 I’ve always been amazed that I got into the wine business with so few years of previous practical experience but necessity forced me to catch up fast. Now I smell and taste every liquid that I drink as if it was a wine tasting. Frankly, I’m beginning to think that it’s a stupid thing to do. When I took a step back from the front lines of the wine wars, I told myself that I was going to ‘enjoy’ wine again rather than look at it with a professional eye, nose and palate. This means not paying much attention to what wine writers and magazines say about any given wine.

If there’s one thing that almost 40 years in this business has taught me is that tasting is subjective. I’ve always believed in my own palate. Too many wine lovers have forgotten this simple truth, tending to rely on a so-called expert’s opinion. This is why so many uninspiring wines (in my humble opinion) have filled the shelves at wine shops and supermarkets. The next time you like a bottle of wine, tell your friends about it. We have to make word-of-mouth the driver of sales in the wine business.

White Rioja revisited

 

All of a sudden, everyone is talking about white Rioja.  This time around, the debate is taking place where it should be – among winemakers.  No Regulatory Council politics, just straight talk. It’s about time.

An interesting event organized by the Rioja Sommeliers’ Association a few weeks ago brought several winemakers together for a panel discussion and tasting about the future of white Rioja. The speakers were:

• Basilio Izquierdo – former winemaker at CVNE, currently the owner of his own winery.
• Juan Bautista Chavarri – a winemaker and researcher at the experimental viticulture center and winery at La Grajera, run by the Government of La Rioja. Juanbe is a specialist in white tempranillo.
• Juana Martínez  – researcher at the CIDA (Centro de Investigación de Desarrollo Agrario).  Government of La Rioja.
• Juan Carlos Sancha – researcher specializing in native grape varieties on the verge of extinction in Rioja, owner of Bodegas Ad Libitum.
• Abel Mendoza – owner of Bodegas Abel Mendoza, specializing in white Rioja.
• Raúl Acha – winemaker at Castillo de Maeterra (Vinos de la Tierra Valles de Sadacia) and Hacienda López de Haro (D.O. Ca. Rioja).

Some background:

White Rioja production has dropped in the last 25 years from9.000 hectares (1985) to 3.850 hectares in 2010.

Three white varietals have traditionally been used in Rioja: viura, malvasía and white garnacha.  Six more were authorized by the Regulatory Council in 2007:  maturana, turruntés, white tempranillo (varietals on the verge of extinction), chardonnay, verdejo and sauvignon blanc.

The new varieties were approved with several conditions. 

• No new planting unless other vines are grubbed up.  
• The ‘comunidad autónoma’ or regional government (in this case, La Rioja, Navarra and Álava) has to authorize it.
• The native varieties can stand alone in a Rioja white, while the international varieties can be no more than 50% of a blend.

The negotiations were so drawn out that in the meantime, Rueda gained a foothold throughout Spain, including the bars and restaurants in Rioja.

The president of the Sommeliers’ Association, Carlos Echapresto, set the tone for the debate when he stated that the evolution of Spanish cuisine and more specifically, the wider use of vinaigrettes and other white sauces has provided more opportunities for serving white wines.  Chefe Paniego, the sommelier at Echaurren in Ezcaray (1 Michelin star) said that consumption of white had increased by 60% when elaborate (vs traditional Riojan) dishes were ordered.

As the winemakers took their turns speaking, it became clear that two different attitudes toward white Rioja had emerged.

In light of the success of red Rioja and the wide acceptance of other Spanish whites, notably Rueda and Rías Baixas, in Spain and abroad, most wineries are reluctant to grub up red vines to plant white grapes, because most white Rioja is perceived as being old fashioned.  As Juanbe Chavarri put it,  ‘lacking in impact aromas’.  Big commercial wineries don’t seem to be interested in making a low-priced white to compete with Rueda, whose production has increased from 10 million kgs per year to 75 million kg to keep pace with demand.  Moreover, grape prices in Rioja are low, discouraging growers from reducing yields to produce more complex wines.

The view championed by the winemakers at this seminar was “let’s see what we can do with our native varieties with low yields and the judicious use of oak”.

Basilio Izquierdo favors low-yielding white garnacha and viura for his ‘B de Basilio’.  In the tasting it was elegant and delicate, almost understated. 

Juan Bautista Chavarri from the La Grajera experimental winery near Logroño likes white tempranillo, viura and malvasía.  He showed three white tempranillos at the event – one aged in acacia wood, one aged in French oak and an unoaked one.  I liked all three but thought that the acacia-aged white was the most original.

Juan Carlos Sancha spoke of his 23 years of experience trying to salvage native Riojan grapes from extinction.  When he was the director of Viña Ijalba, the company launched the first white made from maturana, a grape that he works with at his own winery under the brand Ad Libitum.  I liked it because of its notes of honey.  One of the sommeliers tasting beside me said it reminded him of chenin blanc.

Abel Mendoza cultivates low-yielding viura and malvasía from his own vineyards and others in the Sonsierra area. His barrel-aged white was fantastic, showing delicate apricot notes and lip-smacking intensity on the palate. 

Raúl Acha from Castillo de Maetierra (a ‘vino de la tierra’ from Rioja Baja) offered a riesling that didn’t especially impress me because I had just been in the Rhine tasting whites for a week.  His company, one of the founding members of the vino de la tierra Valles de Sadacia, specializing in moscatel de grano menudo,  is also working with international white varietals.  I was disappointed that he didn’t bring his viognier, which I had really liked at an earlier tasting.

This seminar and tasting confirmed a feeling I’ve had for quite a while now:  the terroirists in Rioja, large, medium and small, believe that they can attract consumers to white Rioja with complex, intense wines made with low-yielding viura, malvasía, white garnacha, white tempranillo and white maturana.  They’re not supermarket wines, and therefore not so easy to find, but definitely worth looking for.

As far as I know, only Barón de Ley 2011 has been made using  the new international varieties.

While I’m on the subject of white Rioja, here are some other favorites of mine:

• Muga barrel fermented
• Remelluri
• Allende
• Finca Nueva (from Finca Allende)

I’ve heard good things about the following two, but haven’t tasted them yet:

• Dinastía Vivanco white tempranillo
• Cosme Palacio 1894 (the year the winery was founded) vintage 2007

Juana Martínez made a comment that the Rioja wine trade should think about when she said , “White wine is the product people try when they first become interested in wine.  Since as much white as red is consumed in our major markets, we shouldn’t forget how important it is.”

 

 

 

 

Riojitis

Every Friday the Spanish financial newspaper Expansión publishes a glossy full-color supplement devoted to luxury lifestyle goods.  This might seem strange in a country where 20 per cent of the working age population is unemployed and the economy is in a permanent state of stagnation.  Since Expansión is owned by a group that represents the center-right in Spanish politics, the home of the banking and industrial sector I guess that writing about $10,000 watches, vacations in luxury resorts in the South Pacific and $500 cell phones is sound advertising.

Even their blogs cater to the rich.  I laugh every time I recall reading that one of Spain’s best-known gastronomic gurus bought a Rolex with his first paycheck as a young man. Need I say more about the drift of this magazine?

I read it because they often write about wine.  A couple of weeks ago there was a feature about wines reviewed by some of Spain’s best-known actors and actresses.  I thought it was a novel approach because in the wine business we’re tired of reading what wine writers have to say.

One word caught my eye, however:  riojitis.  This word is used all the time, defined as an ailment affecting wine drinkers who ask for a Rioja when they go to a bar or restaurant.  A similar ailment is called riberitis.

Sadly, I know why riojitis is so popular.  Envy, pure and simple.

One of the first books I read when I came here to live was Spain and the Seven Capital Sins by Fernando Díaz-Plaja.  I read it in Spanish but it was available in English too.  It’s probably out of print today but I’ll bet you can buy it from Amazon.  In any case, it’s a good read for anyone who wishes to understand this sometimes perplexing country.

Envy is the number one capital sin inSpain, but everyone practices it, making it the national pastime. I don’t think that too many people talk about it in the confession booth.

Twenty five years ago, Rioja was the only game in town here. Of today’s wine media darlings, Ribera del Duero was just getting started, Rueda was known for sherry-style whites aged outdoors in big glass jars, Toro and Jumilla were  places to buy heavy reds from cooperatives and Priorato was the home of a company that made altar wine.  The hottest wine in Galicia was Ribeiro, then mainly known as a very acidic red wine served in white ceramic bowls with dishes of spicy octopus. La Mancha was La Mancha (and still is).

Of course, times have changed (for the better) and consumers have a wider range of choices than ever but Rioja is still Spain’s most popular wine district, both here and abroad.  Why?  Because we’ve been working longer and harder to promote it than anyone else.

I have some grammatical suggestions for wine writers who are jealous of Rioja’s success.  If you insist on adding Greek and Latin suffixes to Rioja, be honest and call yourselves riojaphobes, because we riojaphiles will keep on trying to riojafy you.   Call me a riojamaniac if you wish but I’m filled with riojapassion.  So there.

Gerry Dawes: “The 1947 Bosconia is the best red wine I have ever drunk.”

After several attempts I’ve finally gotten my interview with good friend, eating, drinking and bullfighting buddy Gerry Dawes, who I’ve said many times is one of the two guys with the most comprehensive knowledge of Rioja.

Here are my questions and his answers, which I have copied verbatim. Hold on to your hats.  This is vintage Gerry, once again pulling no punches.

When did you first taste a Rioja? Do you remember what brand and vintage it was? What were your impressions?

Back in the late 1960s, like everyone else who visited (or in my case lived in) Spain, I drank Federico Paternina Banda Azul. Rioja wines were Spain’s best red wines and I developed a taste for them over a period of several years. I thought many Rioja were great. Marqués de Riscal was a bit of a luxury and so was Cune Imperial and Cune Viña Real, but once in awhile I got to drink them. I still remember finding Cune Imperial Gran Reserva 1959 on the shelf of a Costa del Sol shop for 225 pesetas a bottle when I lived in Mijas overlooking the Costa del Sol. I grabbed all three bottles.

Believe it or not, I still have a bottle of Imperial Gran Reserva 1959 left, a bottle of Cune Viña Real Gran Reserva Oro 1962, a Marqués de Murrieta Castillo de Igay 1942, a Viña Tondonia 1947 and a few other assorted treasures. Early this year I opened a bottle of Marqués de Riscal 1922 that was still magnificent.

During the early 1970s, when I was living in Mijas, through a wealthy acquaintance, I got to drink the R. López de Heredia Viña Bosconia 1942 and 1947. I had the 1942 two or three times, but I have drunk about six bottles of the 1947 Bosconia and I am still convinced that it is the best red wine I have ever drunk. I don’t say this lightly, since from 1975 to 1996 I sold great Burgundy, Loire Valley and Rhone Valley red wines and the top wines of California (Duckhorn, Ridge, Caymus, Shafer, Pine Ridge, etc.) to the best restaurants in New York.

I have a reputation among some writers and wine aficionados in Spain as being a “Taliban,” as a couple have called me in print. They think because I have defended the classic wines of La Rioja that I have an old-fashioned franquista palate. They are full of shit. Few of them have traveled the wine roads of Spain tasting wines in bodega after bodega like I have.  And I have done it, not from a base in Spain, but from the United States.  Between 2000 and 2010, there was a four year stretch when I averaged EIGHT trips to Spain a year and another four years when I averaged six trips per year. I have been in at least 600 bodegas in Spain, some of them multiple times, re-visiting some of them as many as a dozen times or more.  Has anyone else in Spain–besides the owner Juan Gil, the Marqués de Figueroa, been in vertical tastings of Palacio de Fefiñanes Albariños six times?

My experience is not based on tasting wines by the dozens in sit-down or walk around tastings in Madrid, in Barcelona or in New York, it based on winery visits and long lunches, dinners and private tastings with the likes of such bodegueros as Mariano García, Basilio Izquierdo, Isaacin Muga, Javier Hidalgo, Miguel Torres, Carlos Falcó, the Chivite brothers (before they split), the Pérez Pascuas family, Raul Pérez, Ricardo Pérez, Gregory Pérez, Carles Pastrana, Agustí Torelló, Juan Gil of Palacio de Fefiñanes, Gerardo Méndez and with hundreds of other bodegueros, from bodegas both big and tiny.

For the last several years, I have focused on Galicia, where I have visited and tasted in literally scores of bodegas, say 30 in Rías Baixas, a dozen in Ribeiro, 20-25 in Ribeira Sacra, perhaps 20 in Valdeorras and a couple in Monterrei. And just outside the gates of

Galicia, I have visited and tasted in some 20 bodegas in Bierzo. I have returned to a number of these bodegas as many as 5-10 times!!

And I have worn out many pairs of road warrior shoes walking in the vineyards of Spain with the viticulturists and winemakers. One Spanish wine figure accused me of not knowing anything about Spanish vineyards. I had albariza dust on my shoes before that pompous jerk was born.

Pepe Peñin likes to characterize me as “a wine romantic.”  He has told me that on a few occasions. When it comes to Spain, I still confess after all these years to still being somewhat of a passionate, enthusiastic romantic about certain aspects of the country and its people and I hope I never lose that, but I am out there in the trenches with the real artisan winemakers on most trips and I am just not into wineries so commercial that they could just as well be making athletic shoes. In fact, some of them would better serve the world if they did make shoes instead of the type of wines they are making, as I have heard so often, “wines the market is asking for.” 

I can’t wait to see what kind of wines some of these bodegas are going to make for what the Chinese market is going to be asking for.  I once had a misguided American lawyer ask me to taste a wine blind at his home.  It was awful.  He delighted in showing me a Chinese wine that had a serpent in the bottle.  This could augur well for Extremadura, because there is a wine or liqueur from there with a snake in the bottle. 

When was your first visit to Rioja?

During the 1970s when I lived in the south of Spain, La Rioja came to represent an oasis to me during the hot, rainless summers of Andalucia, my adopted home.

By early July, as you know, the heat settles in over a large portion of Spain.  The sun bears down relentlessly, driving millions of Spaniards to the beaches and cool mountain resorts.  Coinciding with this time of year is the annual trek to Pamplona, where Hemingway’s lost souls come from all over the world to see the sun rise on yet another Fiesta de San Fermin.  Since my former wife Diana and I counted ourselves among the admirers of the venerable Ernest’s fiesta, we too joined the migration each year.

We always set out at least a week before the commencement of festivities at Pamplona, so we could explore the Spanish countryside along the way.  On one of these trips, we discovered the Rioja and it became our favorite place to pass some quiet time before surrendering to the wild, weeklong San Fermífestivities at Pamplona, where peace, tranquillity, and sleep are rare commodities, and not even particularly desirable ones at that.  We looked forward to La Rioja, where we could taste fine wines in cool bodegas, sample superb country cuisine, and enjoy the scenery, history, and milder climate of this high mountain valley.

To avoid some of the scorching road heat of summertime Spain, we would leave Mijas, our pueblo on a mountain over-looking the Costa del Sol, in late afternoon.  We would usually drive into the wee hours of morning to escape the steady daytime flow of maniacal North African drivers hellbent on reaching the beaches and homeward-bound ferries of the southern coast. This was before the construction of Spain’s system of autopistas, so we were driving on two-lane roads.  Apart from diminishing one’s chances of being maimed by a Peugeot, the night offered some relief from being stuck behind the long queues of slow, laboring Spanish trucks belching noxious black exhaust.

After stopping for a brief sleep at a Valdepeñas pensión, we would drive on through Madrid in the early morning hours to reach the ancient Castilian capital of Burgos – the terrain of El Cid – by midday.  From there we headed East towards the Rioja.  In less than an hour, as the road climbed, the vegetation became increasingly verdant, the air fresher and cooler.  The greener landscape, now showing some vineyards, soothes the soul as well as the body as the heavy layers of oppressive road heat peel away.  The promise of a thundershower bringing the cool, night breezes of the Rioja would soon put the dust of the southern summer behind us.

On one occasion, we had written the venerable firm of R. López de Heredia in Haro, letting them know that we again wished to visit their bodega.  The reply had come in the charming, graceful Spanish of a more genteel age.  It went something like, “…We cannot tell you what joy the news of your imminent visit has produced in our bodega.  It would be our great pleasure to receive you.”

We had arranged for two old friends, the late Alice Hall, the dowager empress of American bullfight aficionados, from Milledgeville, Georgia and Carolyn Moyer of Davis, California to join us in a tour of the Rioja on our way to Pamplona.  By 10:00 on the morning of our visit, after a breakfast of rolls and café con leche in the Café Suizo in La Plaza de la Paz in Haro, the four of us were down in the centenarian bodegas of R. Lopez de Heredia for our “second breakfast”– a wine tasting.  Here, in surroundings as incredible as any I have known in the world of wine, Sr. Anastasio Gútierrez Angulo, the firm’s export manager, let us taste some of the firm’s twenty-year old reservas–wines made in the style of a different era–wines of yesterday.

The bodega had all the trappings of a nineteeth-century operation patterned on the chais of Bordeaux– the winery workers even wear blue coveralls as many of the staff at French chateaux still do.  In time-honored fashion, barrels were (and still are today) crafted in the winery’s own cooperage.  We saw workers cracking eggs from the bodega’s chicken farm to get fresh egg whites for fining the wines.  Other employees laboriously filled bottles with reserva wines by hand and corked them with a hand-operated corking device.

Anastasio led us through a man-made maze of cool, barrel-filled limestone caves to the deepest part of the bodega – - the room known at R. López de Heredia as the cementerio–the cemetery.  The cementerio is the resting place of the old vintage reservas dating from the founding of the firm in 1877.  This cellar gets its name from the storage bins lining its walls, which very much resemble the burial niches in the Roman-plan cemeteries of Spain.  Bin after bin was filled with dusty bottles from the greatest vintages of the past.  At one end of the room, a large round wooden table’s centerpiece was a huge, gnarled, cobweb-covered old grapevine surrounded by bottles of wine.

Our host, Anastasio, had selected two gran reservas from the fine 1954 vintage for us to taste.  The first was Viña Tondonia Gran Reserva, a lovely, elegant Bordeaux-style wine of breed and complexity.  The second wine was a more intense, dark ruby wine in a burgundy bottle, Viña Bosconia Gran Reserva, which was showing signs of evolving into a big, warm, rich wine – - aterciopelado (velvety).  The Viña Bosconia had a particularly beautiful nose, one which reminded me of a wonderful phrase that Michael Wigram, an English banker a bullfight aficionado, had used to describe another 1954 reserva at a luncheon during the Feria de Sevilla in 1973, “Gets a nice bloom on it after nineteen years, don’t you think?”

These wines did indeed have “a nice bloom” on them.  They were wines to be enjoyed, not merely tasted and spit on the floor of the bodega, so we sipped them while Anastasio gave us the most charming description of Rioja winemaking that I have ever heard.

 First he described the normal processes of vinification, barrel aging, bottling, and so forth for the bodega’s “bread and butter” – the table wines made to sell in the fourth, fifth, and sixth years after the vintage.  Then, when he came to the subject of gran reservas, the classic Rioja reservas from exceptional vintages, he began to speak of the wine as a living thing.

In this place called the cemetery, he brought his wines to life.  Speaking softly, but with passion in his beautifully enunciated Castilian Spanish, he described the wine’s “education.”

“You see,” he began, “in the beginning, a gran reserva is like a young man.  He gets a proper `education’ here in the bodega, then is bottled and becomes a young caballero.  At about 25 years he reaches the peak of his youth, then he mellows out to about the age of, say, 35-40, when he gradually begins to tail off.  However, some of these fellows do well even after fifty.  A few years ago the owners allowed three bottles of the 1914s to be opened for a celebration.  The second bottle was in fine condition.”

It would be a day to remember – Anastasio’s wonderful analogy and his beautiful wines were just the beginning.  We were four good friends glowing with wine and in the mood for fiesta.  At Merendero Toni in San Vicente de la Sonsierra, we lingered over one of those wonderful Spanish lunches: a simple salad of garden-ripened tomatoes, lettuce, and onions at the peak of their flavor, succulent baby lamb chops al sarmiento (grilled over grapevine prunings), crisp fried potatoes, and lots of Rioja tinto. 

After lunch, with a tape playing the wonderful jotas of the Basque country, we took the breathtaking drive up to the Balcon de la Rioja for the splendid view of the entire Rioja valley.  Diana and Alice, euphoric from the wine, the food, and the splendor of the day, danced the jota on the mountain as a Spanish family stared incredulously at two foreigners – Alice a septuagenarian at that  – performing the regional dance of northern Spain in their own private fiesta.

What was Rioja like back then and how has it changed?

I think my previous answer describes a little of what it was like back then, but one can still have those kinds of experiences since many of them are so often people based.  Corrida days in Haro, the Battle of Wine outside Haro, Logroño’s San Mateo fiesta and numerous experiences that can be had in La Rioja–in Ezcaray and the southern mountains, Santo Domingo and in wine towns such as Briones, San Vicente de la Sonsierra and many other places–still make the region a magical place for those who know the area, its history, its bodegas and its wonderful restaurants and tapas bars. 

Some people see the changes that modernity has wrought and lament the days of the past, but I have seen Spain grow and modernize over a period of more than forty years and I have come to realize that the question should not be about whether traditional or modern is best, it should be about what is really good.   For too long, the priority of modern Spaniards was to throw off the shackles of the Franco era and plant both feet in the modern era.  This caused the criteria to be skewed.  There was a general feeling that anything new, modern, innovative had to be good by definition and therefore most relics of the past must not be so good, when the real criteria should be: What is based on quality is good, what is not, is not.  Just being new, modern and innovative is not all necessarily good.  Some innovation turns out to be quite bad and sometimes it is in bad taste. 

The same goes for some traditions, which often are used to keep people anchored in the past–the status quo is more to the point–though the best of customs, which were at sometime in history, new, modern and innovative, tend to survive and for good reason.

In wine and gastronomy, I have long maintained that it is not tradition nor innovation that is the question.  The question is: Is it good?  For instance, I believe that Spanish modernized traditional cuisine is some of the best food on the planet.  There are great traditional cuisine restaurants in Spain and also some very bad ones.  And as we know, there are a number of exceptional Spanish, Basque and Catalan cocina de vanguardia restaurants, many inspired by elBulli, but I think it is telling that many of the vanguardia maestros are opening tapas bars and restaurants with modernized and evolved traditional dishes on the menu.

As far as modern Rioja wines go, it is the same.  There are great tradition-based, evolved wines in la Rioja and there are good modern wines, but too many of the modern wines seem to be imitating wines from such places as Napa Valley or even nearby Ribera del Duero, making a style of wines that they think the market is asking for.  Now wine drinkers in droves are turning against overripe, overly alcoholic, overoaked and over-manipulated wines, which for the last decade or so have bordered on religion for most modern wine writers.  Now, that change is in the air and Parkerismo is on the wane, it will be interesting to see how all those who have steadfastly been proselytizing for such wines will change their deeply held beliefs about how such manipulated wines are actually superior to honest wines that taste like the place from which they come and that drink very well with the food of that region. 

Wines with a true sense of place–it can be terroir or it can be a style of wine like Sherry or Champagne or like La Rioja wines used to be–are unique, not copies.  And when unique wines find a successful place in markets outside their regions, their long-term success is dependent on that uniqueness that sets them apart, not a sameness which makes them as generic as Brand X and thus much more sensitive to price competition.

You have always said that your favorite Riojas are from the ‘Barrio de la Estación’ in Haro. What do you like about them?

The great gran reservas like Cune Imperial, Cune Viña Real, Viña Tondonia, Viña Bosconia, Muga Prado Enea, La Rioja Alta’s Viña Ardanza, ‘904′ and ‘890′ and, outside the Barrio de la Estación, Bodegas Riojanas Viña Albina and the great Monte Real, Marqués de Riscal and Marqués de Murrieta Castillo de Igay were fabulous wines, each distinctly different from one another, but all long-lived (I have had many that were from 40-70 years of age and still vibrant and delicious).  These were remarkable wines by any discerning wine lover’s standards.  And as recently as October 7^th, at Arzak, Mariano, Arzak’s sommelier found a wonderful Bodegas Bilbainas Viña Pomal 1962, which he served us in honor of the birth year of American Iron Chef Michael Chiarello (Bottega, Napa Valley).

Do you think it’s been a mistake for Rioja winemakers to follow the new world trends of high alcohol and a meaty structure? Have they dialed this back or are a lot of wines still too modern?

Now that we are in very tough economic times both in Europe and the United States, this approach to winemaking can be disastrous for all but a few who can pull it off.  And anyone who wants to sell such wines in the future had better brush up on their Chinese, because Western markets are turning against such excesses big time.  The market is also   turning against wines in heavy bottles, which are very expensive to make and transport,  ecologically unwise,  and, more often than not, have been shown to hold wines that are not only expensive, they are usually not very much fun to drink and are often the opposite of what a wine with charm, grace, harmony and balance should be. 

In my estimation, it is not the time-honored wines of La Rioja that the Barrio de la Estacion, Riscal, Bodegas Riojanas and Murrieta were once known for that will be considered the greatest dinosaurs in the near future, it will be the overwrought, Parkerized, monster wines that never really existed a decade or so ago.  (By the way, what do the makers of such wines not understand about the value of second glass and second bottle sales, which are much more likely to happen–by multiples of multiples–with wines that have 12% – 13%, are not fat and overripe or overoaked?)

Most of the garnacha here has been grubbed up and replaced with tempranillo. What has garnacha contributed historically to our wines and can Rioja reds make it as single varietal tempranillos?

More to the point, “Most of the garnacha here has been grubbed up and replaced with a clone of tempranillo that is prolific and produces insipid wines that need over-ripeness and new oak flavors to make their point, are getting less and less palatable by the day to the broad market out there and for which a lot of marketing dollars have to be spend to sell such wines.

Garnacha was an essential component in a number of great Rioja wines such as Cune Viña Real.  Garnacha and mazuelo added to Tempranillo made many Rioja wines great, complex, multi-faceted and delicious.  Who decided that monovarietalism was a virtue?  The press, who are not winemakers, nor the real consumers of wines?  Oh, well, as Navarra has realized since they ripped out a lot of their exceptional garnacha vines, Aragón, now dubbing itself as the Kingdom of Garnacha, is not that far away.  And should Rioja’s bodegueros change their minds about blending other grapes into the increasingly uninterested tempranillo clone now planted in so much of the region, perhaps a pipeline to Campo de Borja, Cariñena or Calatayud should be considered.

Is there any hope for white Rioja?

The future for Rioja white wines, which I view as extremely dim, will probably have to have its roots in the past.  Viura is an insipid grape.  Among the many wines that I have sampled that were made from that grape from across Spain (counting those that go under the name Macabeo, Macabeu), I have yet to encounter a great one.  (I don’t count the aged R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia Blancos, which owe as much to winemaking technique and to the blend of other grapes as to Viura itself.) 

Basilio Izquierdo’s B. de Basilio Blancos are the best white wines that I have tasted in La Rioja, but the true base for those wines is Garnacha Blanca.   Any future hope for white wines in La Rioja should be based on the blends prevalent in the past: Viura with Garnacha Blanca and Malvasia. 

And rather than planting Chardonnay and trying to make more insipid, copy-cat white wine that has to be manipulated in the cellars to have any interest at all, I would strongly consider planting good clones of Godello in the higher elevations.  Now, there, in my humble opinion, is a grape with a future.

The unusual 2011 harvest in Rioja

Last Friday the Rioja Regulatory Council released the official figures for the 2011 harvest.  In my opinion, this year was unusual for three reasons.

The harvest started and ended earlier than usual due to a warm, sunny spring and summer. This is positive because the weather often turns cold and rainy towards the end of the harvest, especially in the higher parts of Rioja Alta and Alavesa.  In fact, this is why a lot of wineries from Haro have vineyards in Rioja Baja – to blend the fully ripe grapes from the Baja with those with lower sugar from the western end of the region.

Abundant sunshine and high temperatures made for exceptionally high sugar but unripe tannins.  Throughout the summer and early fall, vineyard managers and winemakers complained that they had to decide whether to pick when sugar content would produce 13-13,5% alcohol but green tannins or wait for the tannins to ripen with potential alcohol reaching 16% and even higher.

It will be interesting to taste the wines once they’re bottled.

The third difference is the exceptional health of the grapes with very little incidence of mildew.

According to the Council, 383 million kgs of grapes will be protected by the D.O. Ca. Rioja, compared with 395 million kgs in 2010.

I estimate that sales will be about 274 million liters, 2,6% higher than 2010.

 My projection of the figures (‘000,000 liters):

                                                                      2011                  2010

 Production of wine                               268                 255,9

Shipments                                                 274                 267,1

End-of-year inventory                      844,6               842,6

Ratio Inventory to shipments           3,08                3,15

(years)

From the macro point of view, it doesn’t appear that much has changed from 2010 to 2011.  The harvest is slightly smaller, sales are marginally higher and the inventory to shipments ratio is about 3,1 years.

This last number is widely used in Rioja to determine pressure on grape and wine supply.  The Council figures that a ratio of 2,8 to 3,2 years is optimum.  If it’s lower, it means a shortage of wine and higher grape and wine prices.  On the contrary, if it’s higher, too much wine is available and prices are likely to fall.

 Given the fact that the 2011 number is near the upper end of the scale and sales are stagnant, grape and wine prices will probably remain low.  As I’ve said before, this is good for consumers but unfortunate for farmers.

(Photo credit:  Logroño Turismo)

The Race to the Bottom

One unfortunate consequence of the current economic crisis is the overdependence on price cutting in order to sell.  I think that many wineries were caught off-balance when the crisis struck in 2008 and, not having put a positioning strategy in place, have been forced to rely on increasing discounts to customers.

It may sound strange, but the loser is the consumer.

My wife and I spend most of our weekends near Santander on the north coast, about two hours north of Rioja, and enjoy having a few glasses of wine before lunch on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays with our friends.  Both of the bars we frequent, within walking distance of our house, have the annoying habit of changing wine brands every month or so and each new brand is worse than its predecessor, apparently because the bar gets a better deal.  The prices to consumers don’t change, however.  We’ve offered to find better wines for the bars and are willing to pay more for them but the owners stubbornly resist, thinking that we will keep drinking the garbage offered to us.

Last Saturday was the last straw.  We were offered glasses of a white wine (from a region other than Rioja) that was totally undrinkable.  It was from a well-recognized denomination of origin but I wonder how it was ever given the seal of approval to be called as such.

I don’t like to sermonize, but can’t help but wonder when this is going to stop.  Today you can buy whites from this D.O. for one euro a bottle (and unaged Rioja for not much more).  The foreseeable consequences of this short-sighted policy are driving more consumers away from wine toward drinks with more consistent quality such as beer and more bankrupt wineries.

We’ve decided to take matters into our own hands and drive a couple of miles down to the village for our pre-lunch ritual rather than drink near where we live. We’d rather pay more for wine we enjoy than drink bad wine for the sake of saving a little on each round.

I hope the bars near our house get the message.