Young Blood

After almost forty years in the wine business I have to confess that the business side is getting more boring every day – regulation after regulation by the European Union, legal battles with Argentina to defend the name ‘Rioja’, the ongoing disputes between the farmers and the wineries in the Rioja Regulatory Council, the 67 year old president of the Council who doesn’t know when to quit…. I could go on forever.

Fortunately, wine as a beverage continues to fascinate me in spite of the fact that lately my wife and I rarely finish a bottle at a single sitting.  This week I ran into two young people that have renewed my faith in the capacity of the wine business to innovate.

Juan Bautista García (the winemaker) and Ana Fernández (international sales) are young adults who wondered why their friends didn’t drink wine.  Fortunately, Juan Bautista’s parents owned a small Rioja winery and 40 hectares of vineyards so they had something to sink their teeth into.

Things have started out well for Juan Bautista and Ana.  Their wines have won gold medals in international wine tastings and received top scores in the ABC (a Spanish newspaper) Wine Guide which has created tons of interest in the brand.

I tasted the Paco García ‘Seis’ (meaning with six months’ ageing in oak, something they’re not allowed to put on the back label by the Regulatory Council – boring, boring – so they express it as part of the brand) and loved its fresh, grapey aroma and flavor that invites one to keep sipping.  I bought a bottle of their ‘crianza’ and will try it soon, along with their top wine, Beautiful Things, that I wasn’t able to carry home from the wine shop.

The label is a handprint of Juan Bautista’s father Paco, representing his status as the ‘alma pater’ and inspiration for the project. The winery’s motto is ‘vinos que dejan huella’ (‘wines that make an impression’, an allusion to Paco García’s handprint).

On the back label you can read ‘Ad astra, carpe noctem, nessun dorma.’           (Reach for the stars, live the night, let no one sleep.), a philosophical statement that is sure to resonate with young wine drinkers.

I’m sure Juan Bautista and Ana will be very successful as well as have a lot of fun with this new project.  I hope more young winemakers follow their lead.

www.bodegaspacogarcia.com

Rioja: Process or Place?

Telmo Rodríguez

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but lately I haven’t been reading other wine blogs because I’ve been busy with a project inMoldova and teaching.  But with those projects behind me, I recently dove back into the blogosphere.

One of the most interesting articles I read was on the Dr. Vino blog where Rioja winemaker Telmo Rodríguez from Remelluri spoke out about how people are missing the point when they talk about Rioja (http://www.drvino.com/2012/04/10/telmo-rodriguez-terroir-rioja-remelluri/ ).

Telmo thinks that too much emphasis is placed on process and too little on place.  With the crianza/reserva/gran reserva classification, you know how long the wine has been aged in oak and in the bottle but very little or nothing about where the grapes come from.  He believes there ought to be more emphasis on expressing the character of individual vineyards by making site-specific wines.

Rodríguez is doing exactly that with a new project called ‘Las Lindes de Remelluri’ using grapes provided by growers who used to sell to Remelluri to make wines from the villages of San Vicente de la Sonsierra and Labastida.  Only grapes grown on the Remelluri estate will be used for the Remelluri brand.

While I agree that wines from individual vineyards are interesting (and I like the idea that there are more and more of them) Rioja is a lot more than small wineries making wines from small plots like inBurgundy.

Rioja as an appellation of origin needs volume and strong brands to be visible in the marketplace, something that 2000 micro-wineries could never achieve.  The idea that Riojas can be blends of grapes and wine from different corners of the region as well as single estate wines is one of the region’s strengths.

To understand why so much Rioja is blended you have to understand the climate here.  Rioja Baja (the eastern end of the region) is hotter and drier than Rioja Alta or Rioja Alavesa, often producing wines with 14% alcohol and even higher.  In Rioja Alavesa the harvest usually starts at the beginning of September and gradually moves west to the cooler, higher parts of Rioja, where the harvest ends at the end of October.

The problem is that the weather often turns cold and rainy towards the end of October so the grapes harvested there can be bloated and the juice watered down, producing wines with low alcohol.  To compensate for this, many Rioja wineries either own vineyards or buy grapes from Rioja Baja.

In spite of the historical trend that favors blending, some of Rioja’s most famous wineries produce wines from individual vineyards, among which are

• Viña Tondonia, Viña Bosconia and Viña Gravonia from R. López de Heredia
• Viña Pomal from Bodegas Bilbaínas
• Finca Torrea from Marqués de Riscal
• Contino (a single-estate wine belonging to the CVNE group)
• Finca Valpiedra
• Marqués de Murrieta

Getting back to the idea of process, I think that using color coded back labels to distinguish crianzas, reservas and gran reservas is not only consumer friendly, letting you know if the wine is young or aged, but is also a way to reinforce the image of the brand by offering more than one product under the same brand name.

 

 

 

 

In April for me, in May for my boss and in June for no one

Just about every Wednesday some friends and I have lunch together at a local restaurant.  It’s an eclectic gang consisting of the owner of a gardening and apartment maintenance company, a journalist for our local newspaper LA RIOJA, an advertising sales manager and me.  One of the rules governing the conversation is that anything goes, which is Spain is a guarantee of a lively exchange of ideas.

The conversation last week centered on whether it’s possible to pair asparagus with Rioja.

If you live in the USA you’re probably used to eating green asparagus, boiled and eaten with mayonnaise.  In most of Europe, however, we eat white asparagus, the kind that’s cultivated underground and picked just as the tip breaks through the earth.  For most of the year we have to settle for the canned version, but springtime is the time for fresh asparagus.  Just typing the word makes my mouth water.

April is the best time for white asparagus.  In Spain there’s a saying about it:

Abril para mí, mayo para el amo y junio para ninguno (in April for me, in May for my boss and in June for no one). 

It’s tricky to prepare.  First you have to peel the fibrous outer skin away, wearing gloves so your hands don’t get black.  Then you gently cook the stalks in boiling water with salt and a little sugar.  To serve it, most people make vinaigrette or mayonnaise and dip the warm stalks in them.  It’s one of the two food items, along with baby lamb chops, that most people here eat with their fingers.

The problem is that asparagus can make wine taste terrible.  According to my friend Karen MacNeil, a journalist and wine educator from the NapaValley, asparagus, a member of the lily family, contains methione, a sulfurous amino acid.  Karen and most other wine and food writers recommend fruity, unoaked white wines such as pinot grigio or sauvignon blanc with asparagus, but here in Rioja we’re prone to reds, so what to do?  This was the gist of our lunch debate.

To make a long story short, the consensus of opinion was:

• The best red Rioja to drink with white asparagus is young and fruity, better if it’s a cosechero (red vinified from whole berries, much like beaujolais nouveau, but better!)
• Since we all love Rioja and white asparagus, we think that the enjoyment of the meal should outweigh any discussions about how to mask the taste of methione, so our conclusion was:  forget everything you’ve heard about wine and food pairings and just have fun!

From Earthmoving to Ecological Viticulture – Viña Ijalba

Monterrey, the bar conveniently located next door to our apartment building, held its bimonthly charity wine tasting earlier this week. This time it was Viña Ijalba’s turn.

The business was founded on an unusual premise – earthmoving.  Dionisio Ruiz Ijalba had a very successful gravel business but didn’t know what to do with the land after removing the stones and grinding them into smaller pieces to sell to road construction companies.  He decided to fill in the pits with earth and plant grapevines and olive trees.  Currently the company owns 80 hectaresof vineyards and 20 hectares of olive orchards.

When Ruiz Ijalba decided to build a winery in 1991 there was a lot of scepticism in Rioja about how a newcomer to the industry could survive, but the company has succeeded beyond the founder’s wildest expectations.

One of the keys to the winery’s success was the appointment of Juan Carlos Sancha as managing director.  Sancha, an enologist, agronomist and university professor had always showed an interest in reviving  grape varieties on the verge of extinction in Rioja and studying their possibilities for use as Rioja grapes.  At the time, a lively, and as it turned out, almost eternal debate was taking place about the possible use of international varieties like cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay in Rioja and talk of new local varieties only served to fan the flames.  Of course this turned into a political stalemate and is the topic of another post.  Viña Ijalba, however, led the charge in favor of allowing experimental plots of these varieties (you can see them in front of the winery) and after what seemed like an eternity, several of these almost forgotten grapes, notably maturana tinta and maturana blanca were allowed to be used to make Rioja. To my knowledge, the first 100% graciano sold commercially in Rioja was also made at Viña Ijalba.

Naturally, Viña Ijalba was the first company off the starting line when these vairieties were finally allowed.

Back in the early 1990s, using new varieties was just a dream, and the winery realized that it had to innovate in other ways to succeed.  They decided on a three-pronged strategy:  avant-garde labeling, curious brand names based on names for colors (múrice is from the purple ink secreted by a type of clam and genolí is a pale yellow pigment used by artists), and ecological viticulture.  In fact, Viña Ijalba was the first Rioja to use the ecological viticulture association’s seal on their bottles in 1998.

At the tasting this week, the winery’s current winemaker Pedro Salguero showed us three wines: Genolí 2011, Múrice crianza 2008 and Ijalba reserva 2007.

Genolí – 5000 bottles made – , exclusively from maturana blanca (or rivadavia), was pale yellow with aromas of lemon peels and peaches, elegant and full-bodied.  This will always be a connoisseur’s Rioja because the grape clusters are only about one third the size and weight of a cluster of viura and consequently most growers won’t bother with it.

Múrice crianza 2008 – 70000 bottles made – is a blend of tempranillo (90%) and graciano (10%).  Medium garnet, strawberries and cinnamon on the nose with medium body, ripe tannins and easy to drink.

Ijalba reserva 2007 – 30000 bottles made – is a blend of 80% tempranillo and 20% graciano.  Aged for 20 months in French and American oak and 16 months in the bottle before release.  Medium-high intensity garnet (you can’t see your fingers if you look through the wine), red and black stewed fruit and oak – maybe a little overdone – firm tannins, long mouthfeel with an elegant structure.

Viña Ijalba is a great example of how to innnovate in a crowded market.  Their wines are definitely worth looking for.

Bodegas Viña Ijalba

Carretera de Pamplona, km. 1

26007 Logroño (La Rioja)

Tel. +34 941 261 100

www.ijalba.com (the company is currently revamping the website)

 

 

Wines from Moldova – Under the radar, but not for long

Moldova is under the radar for all but the most enlightened North American and Western European wine drinkers.  If, however, you’re from Russia or a former Soviet-bloc country you have undoubtedly had wine fromMoldova because it was one of the leading suppliers to the USSR.

Practically all Moldovan wine was shipped in bulk and bottled in the USSR so there was little incentive to produce high quality or create brands.  Even after the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s, the wine trade went on as usual.

In 2006, however, Russia denied access to Moldovan wines, accusing Moldova of using illegal pesticides in the vineyards, refusing payment for wines already shipped.  The accusation proved to be false, but payment was never made, so when the ban was lifted at the end of 2007, Moldovan wineries were choked with debt and unable to invest in the infrastructure necessary to compete on 21st century terms.

The industry has been encouraged to find new markets and some wineries have been successful selling bottled wine to Eastern Europe, Germany, the UK and the USA, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to raise the standards of viticulture, winemaking, sales and marketing to western consumers.

I spent last week in Moldova as part of a team hired by the European Investment Bank to provide technical assistance to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Industry and the trade following a 75 million euro loan provided by the EIB.  My first impression about Moldova’s potential was positive.

Most vineyards have been planted to international varieties such as cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, riesling and merlot.  I was more interested, however, in tasting wines made with local grapes such as the white varieties feteasca alba and feteasca regala and the red variety rara neagra.  Some of the winemakers we talked to seemed to turn their noses up at the mention of these local varieties, so we tried to explain that part of the international success of Chile,Argentina and Spain was due to carmenère, malbec and tempranillo.  We also tried to make the point that unless Moldovan chardonnay and cabernet were vinified to express the character of the soils and climate of the country and were marketed as Moldovan, the risk was that their cab and chard would only be attractive as commodities and only if the price was right.

We’re returning toMoldova the first week in April to visit wineries and taste more wines, after which I’ll have a better idea of the current state of the industry.  The Ministry, several wineries and winery associations and international cooperation agencies are working together to create a strategic sales and marketing plan, which includes the creation of a public-private national wine promotion board like Wine Australia.

The Wine Walk

Whenever I travel I try to tune in to the local wine scene.  After so many years in the business I can’t help it.  Last Saturday my sister and her girlfriends took me to a small beach town in northern Florida for the once-monthly wine walk.

New Smyrna Beach is a town straight out of the 1950s, and the residents like it that way.  No high rises, a pristine beach, sea grass everywhere, art galleries and friendly bars and restaurants.  The mayor, a young guy, is trying hard to attract quality tourism to the town and one of the efforts most widely supported by the locals is the wine walk that takes place on the fourth Saturday of each month.  You buy 20 tickets for 20 dollars, take a sheet where the route and available wines is mapped out, pick up your tasting glass and take off.

There are twelve stops on the route, at cafes, bars, gift shops and art galleries.  At each stop you have a choice of between three and twenty bottles where you can use from one to five tickets. You are also encouraged to shop and have a snack.

The selection of wines was a microcosm of the U.S. wine scene. California was the most widely represented, followed closely by Italy.  Surprisingly, Argentine malbec was on practically all the stops.  Not surprisingly, no Spanish wines were poured unless you consider sangría, which is apparently enjoying quite a comeback.  After years of trying to create a positive image for Spain, it was a shock to see everyone drinking sangria.

I tasted the following wines:

• BV Coastal pinot grigio
• Rosenblum zinfandel *
• Ferrari-Carano fume blanc 2009 (Sonoma) **
• Cupcake Vineyards Angel Food 2010
• Manos Negras carmenere 2009 (Chile) **
• Cain Concept 2007 (Napa) **
• Folie à Deux zinfandel 2009**
• Di Majo Norante sangiovese Osci 2010 *

As a rinse I also had a few glasses of Great White, a craft beer. Going to a beach bar was great fun.  Since it was Daytona 500 race weekend there were lots of bikers, tan, 50-something beach bunnies and middle-aged hippies along with loud rock music which sure brought back memories for me.

In spite of my immense disappointment about the total absence of Spain in the tasting it was great to taste lots of new wines and see everyone having so much fun swirling, sipping and talking about the wines they were tasting.

If you’re ever in northeast Florida the fourth Saturday of the month, head over to New Smyrna Beach.  You’ll have a blast!

Logroño-La Rioja – Spain’s gastronomic capital for 2012

When the media publishes statistics, La Rioja is usually at the bottom of the chart because we’re the third smallest province in Spain, just ahead of Spain’s two North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla.

We recently got a big boost to the top with the announcement of Logroño-La Rioja’s appointment as Spain’s gastronomic capital in 2012.

What usually happens in cases like this is for the local and regional government tourist bodies to organize a series of events.  The private sector here usually waits for the government to open its pocketbook rather than take the initiative.  This time, however, local business has taken the lead.

Somos Capital (an expression with the double meaning of ‘We’re the Capital’ or ‘We’re Important’), created by the restaurant Tondeluna, owned by the Paniego family in Ezcaray, one of La Rioja’s two 1-Michelin-starred restaurants and the Marqués de Vallejo hotel has organized a program of appearances by some of Spain’s best chefs and food writers to celebrate this honor throughout the year..

Among the chefs who have accepted an invitation so far are:

• Juan Mari and Elena Arzak
• Andoni Luis Adúriz
• Quique Dacosta
• Paco Morales
• Lorenzo Cañas
• Marisa Sánchez
• Ignacio Echapresto
• Juan Ángel Rodrigálvarez

The last four chefs are from La Rioja, adding to the excitement.

Francis Paniego of Tondeluna hopes that Ferrán Adriá will accept, too (“He hasn’t said ‘no’ yet”).

The timetable for each event is:

6:30 pm   a press conference with the week’s guest

7:30 pm   a short talk by the guest

9:00 pm   dinner and wine pairing featuring some of the best Rioja wines, with the guest chef-inspired menu prepared   by the staff of Tondeluna.

Five per cent of the total take for the evening will be donated to ARSIDO (the Down’s Syndrome Association of La Rioja).

Each dinner and tasting costs 50 euros per person and is open to 50 guests.

I was pleasantly surprised to read about this and hope I can attend at least one of the dinners.  It’s going to be tough, however. The price is right, the chefs are the best in Spain and it’s for a worthy cause. 

How can the local government top that?

Speed dating with wine and tapas at Bodegas Franco-Españolas

The other day an e-newsletter from a Rioja winery – Bodegas Franco-Españolas – landed in my inbox. I was surprised because given the popularity of Facebook and other social media, most winery news nowadays is transmitted to ‘friends’ or ‘likes’. That’s a shame because believe it or not, lots of people I know don’t want to have anything to do with social media because they’re afraid that their personal information will be shared beyond their circle of friends. In any case, this one-page newsletter had just the right amount of information: a brief report about the 2011 harvest in Rioja, an invitation to participate in a Valentine’s Day speed dating/wine and tapas tasting in the winery on February 11 and a description of three of the winery’s reserva wines: Rioja Bordón, Barón de Anglade and Bárbaro.

The speed dating event really caught my attention. The concept is great – no pressure like in a normal ‘date’ (as if I remember what THAT was like!) Each person talks for seven minutes with different members of the opposite sex and at the end of the event there’s a big mixer where you can spend more time with the people you got along with at the first meeting. Here, the meetings are punctuated with stops at stands for wine and tapas, so after a while the conversation really starts to flow.

I think this is a little like musical chairs, where someone inevitably ends up alone, but it’s designed for young adults, so who cares what an old fart like me thinks.

Next week I’ll write about the wines in the newsletter. It was a coincidence that we had both Rioja Bordón and Bárbaro with lunch last Sunday.

http://www.francoespanolas.com

Grape growers on the warpath

When you open a bottle of wine, you probably read the information on the back label to get a feel for what the winery is trying to accomplish.  What you don’t see, however, is the politics at work in the wine region. I’ve been involved with Rioja wine for almost 30 years.  Most of the time, things have gone remarkably well. With the exception of some intermittent dips in sales, full recovery always came a year or so later.  One thing has remained constant, however:  the bickering between the wineries and the grape growers.  Practically all of it has been politically motivated, with the fighting taking place between the winery and growers’ associations in the Rioja Regulatory Council.

On a one-on-one basis – growers and wineries – things work pretty well, because the growers and wineries have a symbiotic relationship – in a denominación de orígen  Rioja wineries can only buy grapes from growers in Rioja, so they have to get along.  But when it comes to discussing industry issues, not only are the winery associations in constant disagreement with the growers, but often the different associations on the same side disagree.

The most recent spat is about the process for renewing the seats on the Rioja Regulatory Council and Interprofessional Committee. These bodies’ members total 200 votes – 100 for the wineries and 100 for the growers. 150 votes are needed to approve measures proposed in these bodies. This 75% majority was created to make sure that policies were approved with a broad consensus. As we shall, see, it can backfire, too.

The election rules changed in 2004 from a one winery (or grower), one vote system with the same weight given to each of the players to one based on the number of liters of sales of Rioja wine made by wineries in each winery association and the number of hectares of vineyards represented by each grower’s association. This happened because the independent wineries (those not belonging to any association) threatened to band together, shaking up the status quo– the power of the association (that I happened to be the managing director of) made up of the biggest wineries that held the most seats in the Council.

The new system has its problems, however. Determining seats on the Council is easy for the winery associations.  For the growers’ associations it’s more complicated, because some of them are farmers’ unions whose members also belong to cooperatives.  The coops can show how many hectares of vineyards their members have, but some members of unions also belong to coops so the union can’t count their hectares.  The unions feel that they are underrepresented, which, as we will see, is not true.  

In 2004, the problem was avoided by negotiations between unions and the coops to avoid the burden of proof of hectares, with the coops agreeing to 45% and the farmers’ unions, 55%. In 2008, this agreement held up.  In 2012, however, the coops want more power and the unions consequently feel that they will lose seats.

Another bone of contention is the process of election of the president of the Council and the Committee.  It was agreed in 2004 that the presidency would rotate on a two-year basis between wineries and growers, with the wineries leading off.  When 2006 rolled around, the growers couldn’t come up with a suitable candidate, so the winery candidate remained president.

In 2008, the growers found a highly regarded candidate but he was rejected by the wineries.  The result:  the winery president stayed on.  By 2010, the process was so poisoned that the growers didn’t even propose a candidate.

Now it’s time for a new election.  The growers aren’t about to be hoodwinked again.  In addition, they’re angry about low grape prices (they say the average price in 2011 was 47 euro cents a kilo of grapes, below their cost of production).  They are also angry about the president’s decision to once again demand that both coops and farmers’ unions show the hectares each represents, rather than negotiate the percentages. In this, they are right because the decision to initiate the renewal process must be taken by the Council as a whole, not the president. This time, however, the coops and unions both feel that they will lose representation, so negotiations, if allowed to take place, are sure to founder.

The unions decided that their best show of force was to use their 55 votes to block approval of the Council’s 2012 operating and promotion budget (remember that 150 votes out of 200 are needed).  Last Friday, they partially relented and allowed part of each budget to be approved, but have refused to budge unless an agreement is made to increase 2012 grape prices.

This is impossible because any agreement to fix prices is illegal and would incur the wrath of the anti-monopoly authorities in the government.  The unions know it.

I suspect the real problem has more to do with negotiating representation and assuring that the next president of the Council is a nominee of the growers than the price of grapes and wine.

Until these issues are resolved, I’m afraid that Rioja will have a very small promotion budget.  That’s too bad because we risk wasting over thirty years of hard work and money invested to put our region on the map.

What’s really sad is that until 2002, the promotion budget was funded exclusively by the wineries.  When the growers were convinced to participate, it was seen as a great leap forward. In retrospect, however, it was a leap off a cliff.

 

(Photo of tomahawk:  cainmo.com)

 

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.