{"id":649736,"date":"2025-12-23T05:17:17","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T05:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/649736\/"},"modified":"2025-12-23T05:17:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T05:17:17","slug":"rioja-turns-100-and-no-looking-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/649736\/","title":{"rendered":"Rioja Turns 100, and No Looking Back"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before jumping in on Rioja\u2019s official anniversary, I\u2019d like to wish all of you a joyful holiday season and thank you for supporting Dave McIntyre\u2019s WineLine. This will be my last post for 2025, but I\u2019ll be back in the New Year with new articles, wine recommendations and snarky commentary. I wish you a wonderful season full of good cheer and great wine!<\/p>\n

Rioja turned 100 this year. Not as a wine region, of course \u2014 archeological evidence of wine making in Spain\u2019s most famous vineyards dates back about 2,000 years to Roman times. In 1925, Rioja became the first of Spain\u2019s regions designated as a Denominaci\u00f3n de Origen (DO). Today, it is one of two regions (along with Priorat) to have the highest status as DOCa, or calificada, which translates into English as Qualified Designation of Origin (QDO).<\/p>\n

Last month, I was fortunate to attend a century celebration dinner at The Bazaar by Jos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s<\/a>, featuring wines from the cellar of Alvaro Gimenez. Gimenez explained that he inherited his uncle\u2019s wine collection and then built upon it to create a cellar of about 10,000 bottles. The menu featured 10 wines dating back to 1961, but Gimenez opened the dinner with an off-menu surprise: a bottle of CUNE Imperial 1936.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A menu of a lifetime. Photo: Me<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not only tasting Rioja tonight \u2014 you\u2019re tasting history,\u201d Gimenez said. \u201cThis is a unicorn wine, made during the Spanish Civil War and the start of the fascist era in Spain.\u201d I love historical references like that. My imagination immediately flashed to Ernest Hemingway\u2019s \u201cFor Whom the Bell Tolls\u201d and Saturday Night Live\u2019s early tagline, \u201cGeneralissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.\u201d This wine wasn\u2019t dead by any means. The few sips each of us received were syrupy with flavors of toffee and dried citrus peel, reminiscent of a fine tawny port.<\/p>\n

The rest of the wines were mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, a classic era of Rioja before the DO formalized the aging requirements we know today. A 1961 Bodegas Faustino Gran Reserva was still lively. Two vintages of La Rioja Alta Gran Reserva 904 showed quite differently. The 1964 was ruby \/ brick in color and Burgundian in texture, with dried fruit flavors that beguiled everyone around the table, even with a slight mustiness that evoked an ancient cellar. The 1968 was cleaner and fresher, though less entrancing.<\/p>\n

I swooned for the 1965 Marqu\u00e9s de Riscal Reserva and the 1973 La Rioja Alta Vi\u00f1a Ardanza Reserva, with their tertiary notes of mushrooms and primal forest and acidity that somehow remained fresh throughout the decades. A 1970 L\u00f3pez de Heredia Vi\u00f1a Tondonia was funky and bretty, not for everyone and definitely not for me. (A bottle of 1981 was determined to be unsound and wasn\u2019t served.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is old Rioja in its glory,\u201d said Jordi Paronella, wine director for the Jos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s Group. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t reflect what\u2019s happening now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Classic Rioja, Paronella explained, is centered upon style, and very much a product of the winemaker\u2019s hand in the winery. Variations occur among the three sub-regions \u2014 Rioja Alta, Rioja Alavesa and Rioja Oriental \u2014 but classic wines shared a stylistic core through the wood and bottle-aging requirements of joven, crianza, reserva and gran reserva. (These designations were traditionally used but only codified in the 1980s.)<\/p>\n

For Gimenez, classic Rioja is fresh and long-lived because of the climate and terroir of the region and the acidity these lend to the wines. But there\u2019s also romance.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo open a wine from the \u201830s, \u201840s or \u201850s makes me emotional,\u201d Gimenez told me in a video call after the dinner. \u201cThinking about the people who harvested the grapes and made that wine, and here we are in 2025 pulling that cork that\u2019s been there for decades, is amazing. But the liquid has to live up to its promise, and Rioja it does.\u201d<\/p>\n

As much as Gimenez loves classic Rioja, he expresses excitement about newer styles emerging over the last decade or so that don\u2019t follow the traditional aging requirements, emphasizing grapes other than Tempranillo or Garnacha and aging them in concrete, clay or stainless steel. These wines tend to be lighter and more floral, designed for early enjoyment, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe classic style is based in the cellar, with the regulations and aging requirements,\u201d Paronella explained. \u201cNewer Riojas are more in the vineyard, expressions of individual terroir.\u201d He mentioned Vi\u00f1edo Singular (single vineyard) as well as municipal and zone designations introduced in 2017 (all with their own \u201conly in Rioja\u201d regulatory restrictions), and different grape varieties that have earned official approval.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also excitement around sparkling wines (officially allowed to be labeled Rioja instead of Cava as of 2017, if meeting certain requirements) and whites, with different varieties and winemaking styles.<\/p>\n

These new styles of wines have Rioja raring to go into its new century as Spain\u2019s premier wine region.<\/p>\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n

I asked Alvaro Gimenez and Jordi Paronella to share some of their favorite classical and new style Rioja producers.<\/p>\n

For classical, they named:<\/p>\n

New producers they recommend include:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before jumping in on Rioja\u2019s official anniversary, I\u2019d like to wish all of you a joyful holiday season…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[2000,299,104],"class_list":{"0":"post-649736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-spain"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115767190906537111","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}