Diary of a Shopkeeper, 24th November 2024

Young vines at Ontañón, overlooking the ancient village of Quel.

The Rioja region of northern Spain produces not only some of the best wines in the world, but also some of the most popular. What’s not to like? The reds are fruity without being jammy, generous without being heavy, smooth without being bland, warming without being over-alcoholic. Many of them have lovely sweet notes from ageing in oak barrels. All that and, compared to other famous European regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy, the prices are amazingly affordable. You can get perfectly good Riojas for about £10, and some of the best wines you’ll ever taste for between £20 and £30. If you get bitten by the Rioja bug, as I did years ago, there’s lots more detail to dig into.

Speaking of bugs, a large part of the success of this part of northern Spain is down to an insect. To be precise, the phylloxera louse. This vine-destroying parasite was accidentally imported into France from the USA in the mid-19th century, and destroyed virtually every vineyard in the country. Demand for wine remained high in France, but where was it going to come from? Just across the Pyrenees, in Spain. Winemakers from Bordeaux looking for employment made the journey in the other direction, bringing expertise and modern methods – like ageing in small oak barrels – to the region. Quality soared.

Phylloxera did eventually reach Spain, as it did every wine producing country, but by then a way to combat it had been discovered. American rootstocks were impervious to the pest, as they had evolved alongside it. By simply grafting European vines onto American roots, winemaking could flourish in its traditional homelands once again. By then, however, upstarts like Rioja had also established themselves on the wine scene. We all owe a great deal of gratitude to the phylloxera louse.

Rioja is grown across a broad river valley, nearly sixty miles long and thirty miles wide at its broadest point. The Ebro, Spain’s longest river, created the valley over millennia of meanderings. Seven tributaries carved out smaller side valleys and microclimates. It’s an area of varied terroirs, allowing winemakers to craft a great variety of wines.

The greater Rioja area is traditionally split into three subregions. The westmost and generally highest – it scales the slopes of the Sierra de Cantabria mountains – is Rioja Alta. In my experience it tends to produce wines that are fresh, with a nippy, food-friendly edge. You can taste this in the red wines of producers like Valenciso.

Rioja Alavesa is the smallest of the three subregions, but is home to one of the largest and best Rioja producers, El Coto. The area has a reputation for being particularly good for white wines, including those made by Izadi, which we’ve stocked for many years. The widely-distributed Marqués de Riscal is also based here, in an amazing ‘exploding’ winery designed by Frank Gehry.

The eastmost subregion is the one closest to my heart, probably because I have explored it more than the others. Rioja Oriental is large, with diverse terroir, and slopes down towards the distant Mediterranean. Warm breezes from that direction influence the vineyards here, just as cool winds from the Atlantic influence Rioja Alta.

 Within Rioja Oriental are both warm and cool microclimates, as well as pockets of different soil types. This means it produces quality across a greater variety of styles than the other subregions. The Garnacha grape grows particularly well here. This allows winemakers to make either pure Garnacha wines, like Quierón’s El Arca, with its stunning depths of flavour, or else introduce some into their blends with the more widely-grown Tempranillo. The latter approach creates wines of great complexity, like Quierón’s other outstanding red, Mi Lugar.

What to eat with a glass of Rioja? The centre of Logroño, Rioja’s largest town, is made up of a network of narrow streets and closes, opening out suddenly into small squares, or onto surprising vistas of the Ebro or the mountains to the north. Think of Stromness, but with a river instead of the sea, and temperatures about 20 degrees warmer. Every other door opens into a tapas bar, each serving its own speciality: tortilla, anchovies in olive oil, beef cheeks, garlic mushrooms on cocktail sticks with a shrimp on top. On one memorable occasion I gobbled up a lovely roasted meatball, only asking afterwards for a translation of embuchado de cabrito. ‘I think you say, ‘stuffed goat,’’ Conrado told me.

It was delicious, as was the glass of juicy red Ontañón Rioja that accompanied it.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 27th November 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.