Red Wine in Rioja

A vineyard sentry hut.

We arrived at our hotel in Abalos in the evening. Abalos is a very small town of 200 people with over a dozen wineries, one hotel, three bars a bunch of buildings owned by the Marquis and not much else. Our hotel was a nice little casa ruales (like a B&B) with 9 rooms and a bar out front which has a cast of locals each night enjoying 80 cent glasses of wine. After unpacking, we had dinner at the bar, which consisted of 3 different wines, getting progressively more complex, and some tapas. Every Friday night, the bar does free tapas and as a result, it's super busy with locals and people staying at the hotel.

The next morning, we had a tour of the vineyard followed by a tasting with lunch. It was part of a special program at the hotel where the owner, who has a small winery on the side, took us out to his grapes and we talked about how he grows them. The main difference is that he uses a traditional pruning system that creates 3 main vine trunks as opposed to putting them on a trellis. As a result, they must be picked by hand, but you can get more vines per acre. This year, they had a hard frost right after bud break at the end of April, so the yield is going to be super low. That likely means that the grapes will have a much more intense flavour, so it'll be an interesting vintage to watch down the road.

A >500 year old wine press.
Bring your own feet!

He also showed us these stone huts on the side of the road and a traditional wine stomping ground cut into the rock. The stone huts were for the vineyard sentries. Around 1890, phyloxera had hit a lot of Europe, but it hadn't hit the region yet. The French had already figured out how to graft the vines onto North American rootstock, but it wasn't necessary yet in the Rioja. That being said, vines take a number years to start bearing fruit, so some farmers were starting to transition their vines so that when phyloxera arrived, they wouldn't be wiped out. Of course, these new vines were expensive, and so some unscrupulous souls decided it's easier to just dig up your somebody else's vines. To combat the thieves, the growers and wineries hired sentries to guard the vineyards and the huts were built to given them shelter.

For lunch, we had a vertical tasting of his wines with the 2008, 2010 and 2011 vintages. All were excellent, but you could definitely see the difference in age. His wines are a very low production so he only makes one wine per year and then it's sold exclusively in the hotel. Eventually, he wants to grow it into a bigger winery that sells elsewhere, but it's a long, slow process.

The church in Abalos

After lunch, we drove to Haro to do some more tastings. There is a group of wineries all clustered in the same spot, so it's easy to park at one and walk to the others. We ended up going to López de Heredia and Roda. Roda was really interesting because we were able to do a vertical tasting of one of their reservas with samples from 1995, 1998, 2002 and 2010. It's possible because they have a corovin system that uses a needle to go through the cork and then injects argon into the bottle to force the wine out. This ensures that no extra oxygen gets in. Surprisingly in the tasting, there wasn't that much difference between the 1995 and the 2002. The old wines were surprisingly fresh and definitely didn't taste like a 20 year old wine. They were starting to get tawny and get a touch of those leathery notes, but the fruit and spice was still the dominant note. In Rioja, they typically age their wine a lot, with the grand reservas requiring at least 5 years of aging. This works great with the tempranillo because it has structure that can hold up for a long time.

After the tasting, we returned to the hotel for dinner. Food is cooked by the owner's wife and she's one hell of a cook. She goes in to San Sebastian for cooking classes each year at the culinary institute started by Ferran Adria and it shows. We had appetizers of avocado and tomato terrine, a steak main and dessert was a cheesecake for Catherine (the best she's ever had) and a chocolate molten cake for me, which was great.

Vineyard run by the hotel owners.

In the morning, we went to a tasting at Miguel Merino with a couple from Russia. They also had excellent wines, but only started making wine in the mid 1990's, released their first vintage in 2002 and only recently started to make money. It's a brutal business to be in.