SIERRA DE TOLONO, RAPOSO 2018
NEW AGEING TECHNIQUES
Rioja’s reputation was built with oak. Whether the oak in question was the ‘traditionalist’ American variety or the more ‘modernist’ French, and whether the wine was a mass-market crianza or gracefully aged gran reserva, a mastery of the flavours and textures of wood-ageing was the region’s calling card.
In recent years, however – in common with trends in the wine world – many Rioja producers have been looking to produce wines with no discernible oak flavour, experimenting with neutral ageing vessels from concrete to clay amphorae and larger, older oak casks.
Curiously, you could argue that the choice of winemaking vessel is the least interesting thing about the wines of one of the standout producers in the non-oaky school: Sierra de Toloño.
The project of young winemaker Sandra Bravo, Sierra de Toloño is based around a set of tiny plots of old vineyards at altitudes of up to 700m surrounding her small winery in Villabuena de Alava in Rioja Alavesa. Bravo’s winemaking choices are very much in service to the exquisite, organically farmed fruit she harvests from those plots.
Still, those choices have a significant say in the character of the finished wines. Her heart-stoppingly beautiful, almost delicate, fresh La Dula Garnacha de Altura uses fruit from her highest vineyard, with vines that have an average age of 70 years. Bravo conducts the fermentation in large, old neutral oak foudres, before transferring the wine to amphorae. Her Raposo, meanwhile, shows what a neutral ageing vessel can do with a more conventional blend of Tempranillo and Graciano, using fruit from a 100-year-old and a 60-year-old vineyard, which is fermented (with wild yeast) and aged in foudres.
Vessel experimentalism isn’t confined to smaller producers. For its impressive, meticulously planned Lalomba singlevineyard project, Ramón Bilbao carried out detailed research on the effects of different types of oak on red wines from two high-altitude plots, Finca Valhonta and Finca Ladero, with the size, toasting, age and origin of oak barrels (French and Hungarian) ultimately tailored to the tannin levels in each cuvée.
Just as interesting as the oak research is what happens either side of the wines’ respective 14 and 16 months in barrel: the cuvées are both fermented and given their final softening ageing periods (eight and 22 months respectively) in concrete vats, a material that Bilbao winemakers Rosana Lisa Oliva and Alberto Saldón admire for its slower oxygenating effects (roughly half as porous as barrels).