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Rioja Wine
Rioja Wine
The Intoxicating Evolution of Rioja Wine
The bodegas (wineries) of La Rioja call on centuries of experience in creating their famous red wines and, to a lesser extent, their rosés and whites. The vine was a part of the Iberian Peninsula’s landscape as early as 530 BC; Phoenicians, if not earlier Iberian inhabitants, were privy to winemaking skills and later the Romans would greatly increase production and improve upon their techniques. Still visible around the Rioja countryside are the rocks they hollowed out to use as vats, proof that the Ebro Valley, with its ideal soil and favorable climate, has played a central role in the evolution of Spanish winemaking from the get go.
Yet, like the country, the wine of Spain has suffered from the peninsula’s geographical isolation and historical resistance to change. Improvements in the winemaking industry have been slow in coming, though the surge of the last 30 years has finally erased the days when bodegas stored their wine in crude clay jars. Five hundred years of Moorish reign didn’t help matters; the Arabs destroyed most, if not all, vines in the name of the Koran. Soon after the Moors were ousted by the Catholic monarchs, the bodegas of La Rioja began exporting small stores of their wines to Flanders and France; by the 1700’s vine planting, and thus production, had increased considerably. Though Spain was the first European country to enact quality controls on its bodegas, it was notoriously lax in enforcing them until recent times. It was not until the late 19th century, by inadvertently capitalizing on a catastrophe, that Rioja wines began to attract the attention they warrant today.
Around 1870 the plant lice phylloxera began to devastate French vineyards. For once, the isolating effect of the Pyrenees mountains proved beneficial as the vine disease did not make its way into the peninsula until 1890; by that time growers had learned to prevent the disease by grafting resistent American roots onto their vines. In the interim, French producers began to import wines from the Rioja region to supplement their own measly stores. As much as 11 million gallons of Rioja wine was reportedly shipped to France each month during this period. The French, in turn, passed on their Bordeaux methods for making and ageing wines, which resulted in smoother flavors and aromas in the Rioja wines. While techniques have continued to evolve (the introduction of stainless steel casks to many of the Spanish bodegas is just one example), the art of fine wine-making still rests in the hands, the hard work, and the knowledge of the artisans who know when to raise their glasses and declare “salud.”
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