Travels
Life and Wine in La Rioja
By Christine Sismondo
In case we haven’t met before, I should open with a little full disclosure: I’m a spirits gal.
Beer? It has its place. And wine? Well, it’s an important part of my health regimen – I wouldn’t dream of eating red meat without it.
But it’s hard for me to get too worked up about eno-tourism. This may sound slightly spoiled to those who covet Napa tours but, truth is, I’ve found some wine tours, well…underwhelming in the past. Nevertheless, I thought I’d give it another shot in La Rioja, Spain, to answer the eternal question: Can wine tourism be fun?
La Rioja, where wine is almost as essential and common as water.
For those interested only in the Cliff notes version, the answer is yes – yes it can. I had a terrific time and would even do it again. At least in La Rioja, where they approach wine and life, well…differently. In fact, they have this confusing saying which I still don’t fully understand, about how they approach life in a special way because they have the wine. Or, it may be the other way around, that they approach wine differently because they have the life. It really could be either way since, I have to boast – it is a special place. La Rioja is a region of Spain which manages to be simultaneously ultra-modern in its amenities yet, retains the beauty of its medieval and renaissance roots and architecture.
Our home base was the large town/small city of Logroño, a hidden gem of a town that appears sleepy but, in fact, is anything but. I’ve visited sleepy before. This is better described as a “slow” destination with a relaxed pace but one hell of a nightlife. To boot, it’s perfectly located for access to some of the better vineyards in Spain and some of the most stimulating eno-tourism I’ve ever encountered.
Even if you haven’t been to vineyards, you probably have an idea of the agenda: driving through rolling hills and picturesque scenery, punctuated by visits to faux-Tuscan villas in which people taste, spit and try to identify the tobacco, vanilla and horse hair. This generally goes on until somebody gets smashed in the face with a motorcycle helmet.
Imagine my surprise when I didn’t even encounter one ersatz ranch, gothic haunted house or mini-Persepolis. In fact, our first winery was a tiny little house which, from the outside, didn’t look like much more than your average trailer.
Marina Grijalba Aranzubia, third-generation owner of the Valdegun winery.
There we are met by Marina Grijalba Aranzubia, third-generation owner of the Valdegun winery, some nearby vineyards and an enterprising little tourism company called Riojatrek, which takes visitors through the entire process of winemaking from vineyard to glass.
Valdegun is in Fuenmayor, a tiny town on the vital Ebro river which runs through La Riojan wine country, dividing Rioja Alta from Rioja Alavesa (two of the three distinct wine-making regions – the third is Rioja Baja). From Fuenmayor, Marina drove us up a hill to her family’s vineyard, where her father’s grapes bask for their very last days in the warm Rioja Alta sun, alongside countless other small family-owned vineyards. Her family’s grapes are just about to be harvested when we visit – around the fall equinox (slightly earlier than the harvest down the hill in Rioja Baja).
The upshot of this climate for those in the Alta region is that the grapes have a high acidity, which is better for aging. Marina’s grapes may not be ideal for drinking as a young wine or a Crianza (aged for a minimum of a year in a cask and a few months in the bottle), but they’ll be terrific if they’re allowed to transform into a Reserva (aged at least three years) or Gran Reserva (5-year-olds).
Marina teaches us how to test the grapes and see if they’re ready for harvest. Whereas once this might have been done by taste, sight and touch, most growers now also ensure their reading is correct by testing grape juice on a refractometer, a hand-held device which, by measuring the light’s refraction through the juice, determines the density of the liquid and, therefore, the sugar content. Just as we’re testing, her brother, Javier, pulls up in a pick-up truck and she looks at him, face pregnant with another burning question.
In Spanish, Javier yells to Marina: “Only 12.2 – A long way to go.”
Javier had just been performing the same test in another part of the family’s holdings. There, the sugar levels are even lower than the ones we’re getting – our refractometer registered 12.5 and we’re aiming for 13.5. Harvest is running late this year because it’s been a dry summer until just recently when they had an unexpected downpour, which robs the grapes of sugar.
“Everyone was upset with the dry weather,” says Marina. “When it started to rain last week, I said ‘Now it rains?’”
The grape harvest in La Rioja in full swing.
But Marina’s family was in better shape than others. She shows us nearby vines in neighbouring yards whose leaves are yellowing from the rough, dry summer. Young vines can’t thrive in adverse circumstances, whereas her family’s – planted by her grandfather over 50 years ago – have roots that go down as deep as eight metres into the rocky red soil to seek out the moisture they need.
“In fact,” Marina explains, “while stress is bad for people, it’s good for the grapes. The struggle for water makes for concentrated flavour and small grapes which are mainly skin – and that’s where all the flavour is.”
As for her neighbour’s grapes, Marina speculates they will be harvested for table wine. We don’t get to taste them, obviously, but hers are dense, crunchy and sweet under a thick skin. There’s a slight bitterness at the end – something which might change as they sit another week or more in the sun.
Marina then leads us back through fields containing more grapes, surrounded by almond trees, sloe berries, wild roses and bellotas (the acorns upon which the famous black pig eats at the end of its life before it is turned into jamon de iberico) to her family’s winery – the slightly underwhelming trailer-looking edifice.
The Rioja appellation plaque on the front door, however, was an indication that something great was lurking – a sub-basement with 16th century caves and stone wine storage vats. Fuenmayor is full of these nearly pre-modern wine facilities. In a town of 2,000 people, there are about 100 of these.
“Very little of the region’s commercial wine is still produced in this way, though,” explains Marina, who gestures to the built-in stone vats. “Most people have switched to steel vats because they are so much easier to clean.”
Even Marina’s family, who still make their wine according to “old-world” methods, are mainly making wine for themselves and the steady stream of customers who take her RiojaTrek tour. The majority of the family’s grapes are sold to other wineries and they only keep enough for home consumption.
“We are not going to buy wine for ourselves,” says Marina.
Straight from the barrel, Marina extracts a taste from each of the two wines available for tasting – a fruity young wine being aged in French oak and an older fellow which has been aging in American oak for over a year. While neither are going to be next year’s bottle shock, the older wine attests to Marina’s claim that the Alta wines can stand up to the aging process.
Some very, very, very, well aged bottles, indeed.
After the barrel taste, members of the tour get to bottle their very own sample of Valdegun’s offerings and when they haven’t run out, try some of the family’s home-made chorizo.
If you’re like me, you’ll probably drink the keepsake in the hotel room, making room for a, well, slightly more precious bottle in the check luggage. But the parting gift isn’t the point with this unique, interactive and educational tour. It’s a refreshing change from regular eno-tourism, not just because of the utter lack of pretension but also because the hands-on approach taught me more in two hours than I ever learned in weeks of going from tasting room to tasting room.
Add to this a couple of institutions designed for the beginner oenophile – Bodegas Ontanon and Dinastia Vivanco’s Museo de la Cultura del Vino – and you have a really down-to-terroir wine tourism region.
The first is what you might call a gateway winery. I’d go so far as to suggest it as a first stop to anybody who feels they’re starting at ground zero on wine, since they provide a truly educational tasting, introducing their clients to colours and aromas, along with really clear-cut charts and handouts explaining all the basics.
Their promotional booklet identifies the regions, the grape varietals, which years were good in La Rioja, ideal temperatures for the storage of different vintages and how to pair their wines with food. And we got to try their excellent muscatel with Cameros, a local goat cheese – a brilliant pairing, incidentally. Excellent primer for the novice wine tourist.
The second venue is a wine museum. I know, it sounds dreadful. And you might expect it to be fairly similar to the offerings of a standard winery: a barrel room, a few fermentation vats and maybe a trip to the exciting world of barrel-making. But, in fact, it is a fascinating museum – incredibly interactive. One of the first exhibits is a truly gorgeous film of the fermentation process, using magnification and time-lapse photography. My partner in drinking crime says: “I wouldn’t have thought I’d be interested in fermentation on film, but I could sit and watch this all day.”
But I know him. He’d need a drink after an hour or two.
Fortunately, this museum provides. Visitors are treated to a tasting of Dinastia Vivanco wine at the end of the tour, at which point, we have gained a lot of expert knowledge on how to detect aromas in wine, thanks to the neat-o aroma room, a scratch ‘n sniff exhibit with the 30 or so most common flavours detected in wine: vanilla, oak, moist earth, and even eucalyptus, artichoke and horse hair. That’s where I could have sat all day.
Translation: From Port Side to Starboard...the wine is the best.
Perhaps the most spectacular aspect of the museum is the tremendous space devoted to the art and culture related to wine and wine-making. There are numerous renditions of Bacchus, a painting depicting the Bacchanalia of children in which porcine babes are passed out cold, satirical cartoons about wine drinking by Igor Smirnov and Walt Disney and three wine-themed Picassos. This is all just lead-up to the showstopper, though: next we come to a room holding the largest collection of corkscrews in the world.
A corkscrew collection may not sound as enthralling as it is. Imagine, though, a large round room full of beautiful, ornate openers wherein form meets function. One display case stands out, the “irreverentes” – 40 or more genitalia themed and other novelty corkscrews.
I would be remiss not to mention a couple of the other large vineyards which were also terrific. At Finca Valpiedra, where they use only the grapes they grown themselves on the adjacent vineyards, we got to watch the harvest in action. In the small town Haro, we learned how to filter wine with egg whites at Muga, on their impressive tour featuring an in-house cooper and a tasting at the end with a silky white Viura, a bronzy Rosado, a peppery Reserva and a singular Gran Reserva Seleccion Especiale which, to me, had a distinct Gruyère nose.
See, I can play at that game, too.
Juan Muga, though, put everybody at ease with the tasting. “The best wine is the one you like,” he said. Even the big houses are free of pretension here in La Rioja.
Almost directly across the street was Viña Tondonio, where Maria Jose Lopez de Heredia led us through her entirely organic and biodynamic wine-making facility and then deep into what must be the most fascinating cellars I’ve ever seen. The walls are covered in mould and cobwebs. If this were in California, it might well be considered a bio-hazard. And you certainly wouldn’t get a tour.
But we’re not in Napa anymore (Toto). And the preservation of the organisms in the cellar is part and parcel of the old wineways which Lopez de Heredia is committed to maintaining. They still harvest the grapes in wicker baskets and use the same techniques her grandfather used in this same space. Needless to say, there are no foreign yeasts here. And it shows in the wine. You can taste and smell the earthy, organic properties in every sip.
We reluctantly leave Tondonia and head back to Logroño for dinner, where no reservations are needed. Near to our hotel is Calle Laurel, a small area of town with nearly a hundred tapas bars. Here you eat standing up and for about three or four dollars, you get a snack and a glass of wine. Anchovy sandwiches, iberico ham, grilled mushrooms and octopus all go great with a small glass of crianza and, incredibly, it seems that the whole town is out enjoying them with you. It starts out standing room only and by midnight you can barely move – the street is full of families enjoying the life – and the wine. Or the wine and the life.
Whichever way the saying goes, it’s certainly true. And, here in Rioja, the life, the wine and, yes, even the eno-tourism is, well, the word fun doesn’t cut it. It’s an experience. It’s almost transformative.
I got it. It made me want to be a better wine guy.
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