Telmo Rodríguez
Determined to create a new conversation around Rioja, the prolific and world-renowned winemaker teamed up with six of his growers to make a range in which each wine is imbued with a distinct sense of its place of origin
Telmo Rodríguez, you sense, doesn’t like to be labelled or pigeonholed. In London to present his latest range of wines – a fascinating set of single-origin Riojas – he immediately takes issue with being introduced to a group of sommeliers as a ‘driving winemaker’.
‘No, no, no, please, I hate that,’ he protests. ‘I’m not a “driving winemaker”, and I don’t make wine “all over Spain”. I haven’t even been all around Spain because it’s just way too big… Or they call me “enfant terrible”, and I’m 60 years old! It doesn’t make sense to me at all.’
Why do people say such things about one of Spain’s most dynamic contemporary winemakers? As with most clichés, a germ of truth lies within. Rodríguez has made wine in a lot of different Spanish locations – more than 12, at a conservative estimate – and that has inevitably involved quite a bit of time on the autopista.
As for enfant terrible… well, Rodríguez has a habit of speaking his mind: ‘The Rioja business is to produce as much as you can, as cheaply as you can… We want to create a red line between industrial Rioja and human-scale Rioja.
‘The Rioja model of producing 400 million bottles in three categories [age-based crianza, reserva and gran reserva] is dead. No one in fine wine can understand an appellation like that. Imagine Bordeaux with three age classifications…’
EARLY YEARS
You get the idea. While he’s happy for his wines to speak for him, Rodríguez still has plenty to add to the conversation. And, beyond the peripatetic career from Jerez to Ribera del Duero, and from Navarra to Málaga, his love-hate relationship with Rioja lies at the centre of his story.
Rodríguez was five when his father bought Granja Nuestra Señora de Remelluri, a former monastery in Rioja Alavesa with a history of wine-growing dating back to the 14th century. He left to study oenology in Bordeaux, and in France he found role models: Bruno Prats at Château Cos d’Estournel, Eloi Dürrbach at Domaine de Trévallon, Gérard Chave in Hermitage. He also discovered, within himself, a determination to make high-quality wines redolent of place.
A return to Remelluri in the early 1990s, however, brought an illusion-shattering reality check. ‘When I came back home to Spain, my dad said: “Telmo, you can’t make a great wine here, because the country and the market is not interested. England is not interested in a great wine from Spain, they just want a Rioja with oak and as cheap as possible.” That for me was a nightmare. I couldn’t understand why Spain, the most complex country in Europe, was just selling cheap wine – Rioja and Sherry. We have valleys, altitude, rivers, hundreds of grapes.’
So Rodríguez and business partner Pablo Eguzkiza set out on a kind of winemaking odyssey to rediscover Spain’s lost vinous heritage. Over the past 30 years, Compañía de Vinos Telmo Rodríguez has explored more than 350 vineyard plots and worked with 43 grape varieties around Spain, amassing a total of 80ha of vines.
‘I knew I wanted to be small,’ says Rodríguez. ‘I wanted to be human-sized. For me, the opportunity was to find some of the world’s most beautiful, amazing vineyards and recuperate them. And then to show to the market a completely different approach to wine.’
CONTRASTING CHARACTERS
Perhaps Rodríguez dislikes the ‘driving winemaker’ moniker because it implies homogeneity – the idea of an itinerant consultant inflexibly imposing their winemaking template on a location. ▶
‘For me, the opportunity was to find some of the world’s most beautiful, amazing vineyards and recuperate them’
--------------------------- Telmo Rodríguez
But if there is a common factor that links the company’s production – from a recreation of Málaga’s fabled ‘mountain wine’ to the rediscovery of the remarkable Garnachas of
Sierra de Gredos – it is perhaps this: wines that are the result of a studious deep dive into the vinous history of a place, and which then aim to express that place without unnecessary adornments in the cellar.
Rodríguez returned to Rioja, with Eguzkiza, in 1998, creating Bodega Lanzaga in the town of Lantziego as a modern incarnation of 18thcentury, terroir-focused Rioja, focused on the unique properties of plots including Las Beatas, Tabuérniga, El Velado and La Estrada. The return to Remelluri, in 2010, was more complicated. The wines were sourced from the estate’s vineyards, but also from a number of growers in the area. ‘I didn’t want to dilute Remelluri,’ says Rodríguez. ‘So the first thing I did was to separate the grapes from the estate, and those not from the estate.’
GROWER FOCUS
But what of the growers who used to supply Remelluri? Rodríguez says he ‘couldn’t stop’ buying their grapes, and from that pledge a new project emerged: Lindes de Remelluri – lindes meaning ‘boundaries’. Lindes de Remelluri is a collection of six Rioja red wines, sourced from growers in hamlets around Remelluri, many of them high in the Sierra de Toloño. It encompasses important wine locations Labastida and San Vicente de la Sonsierra, but also more mysterious names such as Salinillas de Buradón, Rivas de Tereso and Peciña.
If Rodríguez’s mission was to showcase the contrasting character of each location, then that mission has already been accomplished. The inaugural 2020 releases were all made pretty much the same way, and are largely based on Tempranillo, but the variations in style and expression are notable – from the plush, black fruit precision of Labastida to the silky, faintly meaty sweet red fruit of Rivas de Tereso. If there is a star – and at this early stage, such a notion is largely subjective – it is perhaps Peciña, with its combination of ethereal perfume, savoury depth and fine-grained tannins.
‘Even myself, when I started, I didn’t know what I was doing with these wines,’ admits Rodríguez. ‘I just had to find a place for the growers, but I didn’t want to blend, because I thought it was not completely interesting.
‘I was blind when I bought those grapes – I didn’t know what Peciña was; I didn’t know what Abalos was. I made all the wines more or less the same way [fermented in stainless steel, aged for about 10-12 months in French oak with little or no use of new wood] because the idea is not that the winery should be at the front of this. I felt like a chef who doesn’t want to touch too much.’
And the broader significance of the project, in a region where the value of a wine is still largely dictated by how long it spends in oak? ‘These are six very simple wines,’ says Rodríguez. ‘They are wines made by the growers, they are not special labels, but I think they are the origin of a very important revolution, and to me wines like this today are the best wines of Rioja. But if you put them in a blind tasting, nobody would say they are Rioja. So we have a little problem: we don’t really know the taste of Rioja villages or the Rioja landscape, because we have been masking that.’
TEACHING A NEW LANGUAGE
Lindes’ precise expression of place has obvious echoes of Burgundy, but Rodríguez sees parallels with Champagne, too: another region dominated by brands divorced from provenance, but where growers have successfully emerged to craft superb wines of their own, roots firmly planted in vineyard and cru.
The passionate conviction with which Rodríguez sets out his vision for Lindes, Rioja and Spain evokes not so much an ‘enfant terrible’, but more a priest in the pulpit. ‘When I told the growers that these wines were made by them, that was a big thing,’ he says. ‘I think this is the point where everything changes in Spain. I think Rioja should use this opportunity, use all this movement to explain that Rioja is one of the best wine regions in the world, concentrate on quality and create a new language around wine.’
How will he measure the success of Lindes? ‘Now I’m very proud, because I’m here, talking about these wines, for my growers,’ Rodríguez says with a smile. ‘I’m not working for me, I’m working for 25 farmers. Success for me is that
I did what I wanted to do, and I carried out this idea of helping the growers.
‘I’m 61 this Saturday, I feel very privileged and I’m very happy to see so many small producers in Rioja doing such exciting things today. I think this is the best way you can finish a career.’