Rioja

For many years Rioja had a virtual monopoly of the wine lists of good restaurants in Spain. They offered local wines in carafes. But if you wanted bottled wine, especially red wine, Rioja was the Bordeaux and burgundy of Spain. You were pointed towards Rioja.

It is partly a question of human geography, as well as physical. Rioja is not far from the French frontier; not far from Bordeaux. When phylloxera arrived in the 1870s many winegrowers took off for Spain. They found in Rioja rather different conditions but an opportunity to make good wine all the same. Then the phylloxera caught up with them, and they went home. But they left French methods and ideas.

Rioja is distinctly mountainous in atmosphere. It lies in the shelter of the Sierra de Cantabria to the north, but its best vineyards are still 1,500 feet (460 metres) above sea level. They get plenty of rain and long springs and autumns, rather than endless parching summers. The wine is correspondingly delicate by Spanish standards: well made and at the right age exceedingly fragrant and fine, yet with a faintly toasted sweet warmth, which seems to proclaim it Spanish.

The area is divided into three by terrain and altitude. The areas further up-nver are cooler and wetter. Rioja Alta (the high Rioja) has the coolest climate and a mixture of clays, chalky and iron-rich, and silts that give its wine acidity, finesse and ‘structure’: it makes the longest-lived and potentially the best wines of the region. Rioja Alavesa has warmer, more alkaline slopes. Its Tempranillo is fragrant and pale, less sinewy, quicker to mature, but excellent in blends. Rioja Baja (the low Rioja) has a more Mediterranean climate with heavier soil, largely planted with Garnacha for the strongest but coarsest wine of the three, the right booster for many blends but rarely becoming a Reserva in its own right. The three zones meet near the town of Logroño, one of the two main centres of the wine trade.

The chief wino centre is Haro. The digrnfied little town, old stone mansions in its centre, is dwarfed by its outskirts, which contain 13 large bodegas - almost a third of the total of Rioja. The surrounding countryside is beautiful in an upland way: tall poplars and eucalyptus trees line the roads; orchards cover slopes along with tilting fields of vines. In the rocky valley bottom the infant Rio Ebro is joined by the little Rio Oja, whose shortened name the region has adopted.

There are very few wine estates, large or small, in Rioja which grow, make and bottle all their own wine. In many matters of technique the Bordelais left their mark, but châteaux (with the possible exception of Castillo Ygay) are not among them. To qualify for a Rioja Certificate of Origin a bodega has to be large enough, and almost all bodegas buy in grapes from other growers or cooperatives to supplement those they grow themselves, and make a blend of wine of their own house style. Vineyard names appear frequently on Rioja bottles: Paceta, Pomal, Tondonia, Viña and Zaco are all well known. They are not regulated as individual sites are in, say, Burgundy, but the style of the wines bottled with their names is generally very consistent and high.

Red wine is far more important than white. It is made from a mixture of grapes, in which the Tempranillo, Spain’s best red wine grape, is backed up with Garnacha for strength, Graciano for tannin and fragrance and/or Mazuelo (alias Cariñena or Carignan) for colour and acidity. Bordeaux - and burgundy-shaped bottles tend to be used for, respectively, the lighter (formerly ‘clarete’) and fuller (‘tinto’) wines.

By and large these wines are still made rather as Bordeaux was 50 years ago, to be aged for several years in barrels (two or three for standard, but far more than Bordeaux, up to five or ten, for Gran Reservas), until their darkness and fruitiness has been tamed and replaced with the almost tawny colour and soft dry vanilla flavour that come from oak. In Spain, where most red wine was traditionally inky, they are much appreciated light and smooth, the effect of long ageing in wood. The greatest change in Rioja in recent years has been the move to bottle earlier; to reduce the dominance of the oaky aroma and allow the grapey flavours to blossom. It is a marked improvement: only exceptional wines could stand up to the traditional Reserva treatment. Yet a few, from such conservative bodegas as Lopez de Heredia and Muga, still do, with glorious results.

White Riojas are made of the freshly acidic Viura (alias Macabeo) blended with Malvasia Riojana which adds a little body and aroma. Garnacha Blanca can be used, but adds little except alcohol. Even white Rioja wines were often given four or five years in barrel. When they had grown golden and rather thin, or flat with oxidation, they were reckoned at their prime, whereas earlier, sometimes marvelously stony and up to good Graves standards, they were considered too young. Today many bodegas go to the other extreme, fermenting the aromatic must of the Viura grapes very cold in steel tanks, and bottling it while it still tastes more of fruit than of wine. Others hold to a middle course, ageing whites briefly in wood. The minonty toe the classic line; theirs is the most memorable wine.