RIOJA AND OAK CASKS
Oak or croak!
When did you start drinking wine from the Rioja? Did you become a fan (assuming you are one) before you came to Spain, or was it more a question of needs must, and the lack of other products gave you little choice?
If you were in Britain or most other European countries during the 70s, it would be surprising if Rioja had not featured on your drinking agenda. Apart from claret, red wine drinkers did not have many other options. Of course there were a few chiantis around in those awful bulbous bottles which we emptied (quickly) and then hung up to decorate the kitchen and a bit of north African plonk – but that was about it.
New World wines were yet to make a significant appearance and the drinking public had not developed a taste for fruity flavours and limited tannins. Indeed, so accustomed were we to heavily-oaked wines verging on the just drinkable, that we would probably have said ‘thanks but no thanks’ to a fresh and fruity Australian or Californian red.
Sales figures for Rioja wines are not an ever-upwards unstoppable curve even now, but it was in the late 80s and early 90s that producers were faced with a simple choice: continue to produce wines as they always had or reinvent themselves. To the growers’ credit most took the latter course.
Today’s Riojas are darker, with much more fruit, and less oak. Indeed, the ‘new Riojas’ or ‘super reservas’, as it is trendy to call them, are made with the latest technology, and although barrel ageing is obligatory, it is often hard to detect any oaky taste at all.
So how do you tell a good Rioja from a bad one these days?
Well, the first thing you should do when buying a bottle of the stuff is to forget about the run-of-the-mill supermarket wines at around 5 euros (although there are some notable exceptions to this rule of thumb).
Remember that crianza is good, reserva is very good, and gran reserva should be terrific. If what you have opened appears to be holding back on delivery with little aftertaste, decant it and try it again in an hour. By that time it should have blossomed and revealed what it may taste like in a few years’ time. If there is no wood at all, then you could be paying a high price for an inferior product. You may prefer the taste, but this is not what Rioja is all about. Rioja without some wood - is like roast beef without gravy.
A gran reserva will spend two years in the barrel, although many producers keep them there longer than this, to the detriment of fruitiness – but to the benefit of mellowness. A reserva will have one year’s barrel-age , but some bodegas now feel it is counter-productive to classify wines by the length of time they spend in the wood, and it is becoming increasingly common to make just one estate wine per vintage, with no discrimination between reserva or gran reserva status.
So, the battle lines are drawn: super Riojas or traditional wines? The former are now selling at mind-boggling prices, and the Spanish, German and American consumer seems to have no objection. But, ask yourself, what about the super Riojas, super Tuscans, and super everything else - isn’t there the danger that all wines may end up tasting the same?
With these thoughts in mind I opened a bottle of a famous bodega’s flagship wine which has just been released on the market. It has been 27 months in the wood and 4 years in the bottle, and costs around 30 euros. At that price, you might think, you should get more than a decent bottle. I would have too – but it was not to be.
In spite of the six plus years of tender, loving care which one assumes had been lavished on the wine, and in spite of the tempranillo grapes having been picked in the bodega’s own vineyards in the Rioja Alavesa (rather than bought in from non-wine-producing growers, as is often the case), the end-product was, frankly, disappointing.
The nose was sketchy, and in the mouth there was a lack of just about everything that makes wine exciting. It was not over the hill, or anywhere near it, just short on taste; not much fruit, hardly discernible oak, and a very limited follow-through. Here was a perfect example of an over-priced Rioja that may be one of the many which are contributing to the unsteady sales curve.
With thousands of Rioja wines competing in what is becoming an overcrowded market, don’t assume that a high price will get you a good wine. To be charitable, I am sure this wine is not typical of the bodega concerned, which is owned by major Spanish drinks conglomerate. Its previous gran reservas have been excellent, and the gran reserva especial outstanding.
However, many drinkers have a similar problem with white wines. We have to thank our US cousins for the trend towards oaked chardonnay and oaked just about everything else.
Originally all white wines were oaked, simply because the stainless steel tank had not been invented, But now there is a choice, and, quite frankly, the majority of white wine aficionados prefer the taste of fresh fruit and summer flowers to the dull, taste-impinging wooden oak flavour – which masks just about everything else.
Aesthetically it comes as a shock to traditionalists that most of the white wine we drink has never seen the inside of a barrel, but is this such a bad thing?
After all, what is the point of passing wine through new oak casks for a few months (that is all it is), or worse, macerating oak chips in a wine-filled stainless steel tank, to give a taste that is probably as artificial as manufacturing baby eels from reconstituted white fish of indeterminate origin?
According to the wine media, the demand for oaked whites is dropping in Europe,and wineries are getting back to the business of producing wine we really enjoy drinking – at the right price.
Let us hope that those over-priced red reserves will share the same fate…
