A GUIDE TO SPAIN’S MOST FAMOUS WINE REGION
Welcome to our Rioja supplement – a first for Decanter. We hope you will enjoy it as much as we have enjoyed creating it. Our intention is to give you an authoritative snapshot of the Rioja region today, of the wines and winemakers, what’s happening now, what to do when you make your own trip there and what to buy, be it direct from the wineries or here in the UK.
While the costs were kindly underwritten by the Consejo Regulador DOCa Rioja (riojawine.com), all of the content in this guide is completely independent. What’s more, all the wines tasted and scored in the pages that follow were tasted ‘blind’ (with the exception of the ones in David Williams’ excellent feature on the theme of diversity, see p40).
Having decided on the categories of most interest in 2021-2022 – Garnacha, white barrel-matured styles, Viñedos Singulares – we spent two exceptionally intense days in early July in Logroño, where we tasted and scored all the wines submitted according to Decanter’s best practice tasting guidelines (see ‘The Decanter guarantee’, p79).
We were also keen to take a look back at how Rioja can age, with a tasting of the excellent vintages of 2001 and 2010 (p56). Important, too, was a tasting of the wines that have become established favourites in the marketplace – how do their reputations stack up? It was a series of exceptional tastings – all made possible thanks to the excellent work of the consejo’s tastings coordinator Anne Díaz Bravo.
Now over to you. Pour yourself a glass of Rioja, and enjoy!