Producer profile: La Rioja Alta
From mastering the use of oak to racking wines by candlelight, this is a producer known for its commitment to tradition. But even with this deep connection to the past, it’s possible – and necessary – to adapt and evolve, writes David Williams
When we talk about terroir, we can mean many things. But the one factor that all definitions of the concept consistently agree on is the primacy of where the vines are grown: the soil, the climate, the topography... When we speak of a ‘wine of place’, it’s the vineyard that we are meant to picture. Sometimes, however, isn’t the winery just as important? And just as capable of being indentified in the glass?
Whenever I taste the wines of La Rioja Alta, for example, it’s not the landscape of Rioja that springs to mind – or at least not immediately. The bodega has mastered the art of the oak barrel, its wines a reminder, in an age when ‘oaky’ has sometimes become a pejorative term, that the marriage of wood and wine, when handled with skill and sensitivity, is among the biggest pleasures available to the wine drinker.
And so, as I swirl my glass of Viña Ardanza and my kitchen fills with its evocative aromas, it’s the company’s headquarters in the traditional heart of Rioja, in the famous station quarter of the small town of Haro, that I find myself dreaming about. A bodega that in turn felt, when I visited in 2019, as if it were a physical representation of the wines.
It’s a maze of tunnels, corridors and barrel rooms, dark, slightly faded and frayed at the edges, with row upon row of fragrant oak barrels and dusty, be-cobwebbed bottles stacked in every conceivable corner. All of this is testament to La Rioja Alta’s commitment to Tempranillo-based reserva and gran reserva, styles that are nothing if not a study in time, and which are the bodega’s exclusive focus.
Rooted in tradition
As if to remove any doubt about the importance of the barrel at La Rioja Alta, every visit makes a stop at the in-house cooperage. The company imports wood from the US, seasons it for two years, and employs a team of coopers to craft its collection (there are
currently 30,000 barrels in use) according to its precise specifications. Clearly, buying a barrel from a cooper would entail an unconscionable loss of control.
The cooperage, the winery, the tranquil, reverent, monastic atmosphere: it all contributes to a feeling that what you’re seeing at La Rioja Alta has been frozen in time – that the winemaking practices here are more or less unchanged since five Riojan and Basque families came together to form Sociedad Vinícola de La Rioja Alta in 1890, at the height of Rioja’s emergence as a fine wine producer, or since the building’s construction in the early 20th century. You can almost imagine the ghosts of the first winemaker, a Monsieur Vigier (a Frenchman, like so many of the early Rioja winemakers) and his boss, the formidable-sounding Doña Saturnina García Cid y Gárate, shuffling around in the shadows.
To a certain extent, the sense of continuity is not an illusion. It helps that descendants of the original founding families are still on the board, and that the current president, Guillermo de Aranzabal, is the fifth generation of his family to work in the business.
But the winemaking, too, maintains traditions. Every six months, for example, the winemaking team in Haro still racks the wines by hand and by candlelight. This isn’t an affectation retained for the edification of passing tourists, journalists and trade customers. It’s an old and, as the company likes to say, ‘artisanal’ and ‘natural’ way of monitoring each barrel individually for sediment and imperfections.
But it’s very far from being the whole story. As chief winemaker Julio Sáenz says, La Rioja Alta may be comfortable with being ranked, alongside its neighbour in the Haro Station District, López de Heredia, as the best of Rioja’s arch-traditionalists, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely detached from the modern world. ‘Obviously, the style of our wines is that of the classic fine wines of Rioja, but that does not mean that we are immobile, anchored in the past,’ Sáenz says. ‘We have made small changes throughout our history to continue maintaining our style, while adapting it to new trends and today’s consumers. We consider that part of our success is being able to evolve and knowing how to adapt.’
Full control
According to Sáenz, perhaps the most significant change at La Rioja Alta in the past couple of decades is one that is in keeping with a shifting zeitgeist in the region and, indeed, the wider winemaking world: it’s the now somewhat clichéd (but no less true, for all that) idea that what goes on in the vineyard is every bit as important as the winery – even for a style so dependent on skilled winemaking and blending as classical Rioja. And so, in a region that has traditionally been divided, in a style comparable with Champagne, between growers and producers – and where many of the biggest names still buy in the majority
of their grapes – La Rioja Alta has led the way in slowly consolidating its vineyard holdings so that all its wines are now produced from its own vineyards.
Among its most important vineyard acquisitions was a mature 46ha plot in Rioja Alavesa that was part of the deal (along with a shrine and a palace) when La Rioja Alta snapped up the Torre de Oña winery in 1995. La Rioja Alta now makes three wines from the site – Finca San Martín, Martelo Reserva and Torre de Oña Reserva itself, in a considerably more modern, fruit-driven style than the ‘Haro’ wines. It means, as Sáenz says, that the company can compete in all parts of the contemporary Rioja market: the terroir-driven wines enshrined in the Rioja DOCa’s recent incorporation of single-vineyard and village wines (see ‘Rioja’s single vineyard designation’ by Pedro Ballesteros Torres MW on Decanter.com, October 2019); and the more traditional end of the market in which La Rioja Alta has always excelled. And that dual approach has been aided by the construction of a winery in Labastida that, with its spotless stainless steel and glass and gravity-flow systems, couldn’t be more different from the quaintly ramshackle, history-drenched Haro Station District bodega.
Still, as Sáenz is keen to point out, let’s not get too hung up on the different approaches. ‘The most important thing is a commitment to quality and the constant improvement of Rioja wines,’ he says. ‘They are two models that can perfectly co-exist and need not clash, but rather enrich. In our case, we enjoy both “styles”: the blend in our century-old winery and the terroir in Torre de Oña.’
They can co-exist with styles from beyond Rioja’s boundaries, too. Like many Rioja bodegas, La Rioja Alta had long taken an interest in the rise of neighbouring
‘We consider 2010 one of the best vintages of the century – comparable to 2001’ Julio Sáenz, La Rioja Alta chief winemaker (above)
Tempranillo powerhouse Ribera del Duero, to the west and south of Rioja in Castilla y León. The producer began exploring the area in 1990 before setting about building a winery there for its Bodega Aster in 2000. Rioja Alta was also an early adopter in the Albariño craze, setting up shop in O Rosal in Galicia’s Rías Baixas in 1988.
Highest principles
But for most of us it’s the Rioja wines that continue to cast the most bewitching spell. The flagship is arguably the Viña Ardanza, named after one of the company’s founders, Alfredo Ardanza, who merged his own eponymous winery with La Rioja Alta in 1904, and established it as a trademark in 1942.
Always among the most consistently mellow and complex of Rioja reservas, the 2010 is particularly exciting, and has been bottled as a Selección Especial, a title
bestowed only in the best of Rioja vintages, as Sáenz explains. ‘We consider 2010 one of the best vintages of the century. In our opinion, it is comparable to the 2001,’ he says. ‘To make the blend, we selected the best batches in the vineyards that we normally use to make Viña Ardanza, in a special year with exceptional weather.’ That means a blend of 80% Tempranillo from La Rioja Alta’s Cuesta vineyard in Cenicero and 20% Garnacha from La Pedriza in Rioja Oriental, with the Tempranillo spending 36 months, and the Garnacha 30 months, in American oak. The end result, Sáenz says, is ‘fresher’ and ‘more vivid’, while maintaining ‘the Viña Ardanza typicity and elegance in the mouth’.
We will have to wait and see how the greatness of the 2010 vintage plays out in the two celebrated wines that Sáenz puts at the top of the La Rioja Alta portfolio and that most Rioja lovers would place among the region’s dozen top wines: La Rioja Alta 904 and La
Rioja Alta 890. Both are gran reservas, and the two wines share the La Rioja Alta DNA, but they are quite different. The 904, a blend of higher-altitude Tempranillo and Graciano aged for four years in American oak is, as
Sáenz says, all about subtlety and elegance. Made only in special years (the current vintage is 2005, and there are usually only three made per decade), the 890, a blend of 95% Tempranillo, 3% Graciano and 2% Mazuelo aged for six years in American oak, is more about ‘power’, says Sáenz.
So what is the secret behind these consistently fine wines? ‘They have always been our best wines, [made from] our best grapes in our best vineyards that have always been used to make gran reservas,’ Sáenz explains. But it’s not just that. There is a particular way of engaging with the world at La Rioja Alta. It is one that is always in conversation with the past, but not deaf to the future – making this a place where the candle co-exists with the optical sorting table.
Or, as Sáenz puts it: ‘La Rioja Alta has managed to maintain its spirit throughout its history, shunning fashion and maintaining its own personality in the style of the wines it has produced. Maintaining its personality does not, however, mean it does not evolve. I think that we are not making the same wines as 20 years ago and that we have managed to adapt, even if we have not followed the rules dictated by fashion. Evolution has been a constant feature in our wines.’