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1.1 López de Heredia: What Modern Was

As strange as it may sound, my sense of mission came directly from unbearable ennui.

The endless arguments—some grown terribly bitter before reaching messy impasses—had finally gotten to me. I was sick with tedium and saw little point in saying anything else about the subject.

Ah, the subject... The struggle between the way it was all done then versus the way it is done now, “tradition” versus “fashion” (or, as certain amateur anachronists with little historical sense like to call it, “modernity”), “good” versus “evil...” Arguments were presented in a rather comical mish-mash of pseudodisciplinarisms, from the pseudo-economic to the pseudo-scientific to the pseudo-moralistic... Hearing our many overheated discussions about latter-day winemaking tendencies in Rioja, any outsider to the peculiar customs and mores of internet wine fora would have been justified in thinking us certifiably insane.

And where had all the fights gotten us? The short and simple answer to that is that it had put us far away from the real point of wine, which is enjoyment. Sides were taken, barbs were thrown, damaging accusations—sometimes spurious, sometimes painfully true—were leveled against interlocutors, poxes were wished on such-and-such an old or new wine house... Arrogant discourses from all sides desperately tried to ascertain the superiority of one school of thought over another and, in the worst of cases, not just that... “Winning” the argument could not satisfy those of us completely possessed by self-righteousness. The other side had to be crushed, humiliated.

It all came to a head on the day I was mockingly referred to as a “Taliban” for my rather firm beliefs about what the wines of Rioja should be like. Then I realized we had descended to the true nadir of boring Bible-thumping bullshit. Enough was enough. When dogmatists start calling each other “dogmatic” without a trace of irony in their voices, one should assume something is severely wrong. And run...

Please notice the use of the first person plural. Perhaps the root of my discontent lay in the fact that I had been as guilty as anyone in all of this. In the middle of the battle I had caught a glimpse of my navel and gotten to thinking about... Well, suffice to say that I could hear David Byrne inside my head. He was hollering: “Well, how did I get here?”

Thusly thinking I found myself landing in Bilbao on the morning of 9 November. I was on my way to the wine region that originated so many enocontroversies. I had figured that it was high time to go to Rioja and test my mindset at the very source, to drink every kind of wine—the ones I had always defended and the ones I had always lambasted—and come up with the equivalent of an ideological remix. To be on the safe side and take counsel other than my own, and because I needed someone to drive me around, I brought my friend Camilo along with me. Camilo is a wine novice, but he knows what he likes. Surely he would contribute a counterpoint to some of my long-held biases.

We drove straight out to the first bodega on our very full agenda of visits, stopping only momentarily to leave the bags at our hotel in Haro. We arrived at Bodegas R. López de Heredia-Viña Tondonia exactly on time for our 3 pm appointment.

The place was deserted. We stepped into the darkish, richly-paneled reception area, and found absolutely no one there. We rang bells. We shouted out “hellos...” It took about ten minutes for someone to come out. Apparently they were expecting me, indeed. But what they were not expecting was that I would turn up with such precise punctuality.

You see, not being late is something highly uncharacteristic of a Latino. But I have been living in Northern latitudes for too long. In the United States, punctuality is a bit of an obsession. And that obsession has, I guess, rubbed off on me. I made a mental note to do my best and worst in order to recover that birthright of debonair tardiness.

Of course, the wait for our hosts served me to take in my surroundings... Like I said, a richly-paneled reception area, wearing what is obviously its original décor from the late nineteenth century. Behind panes of frosted glass, a number of desks, deserted. I imagined a scene of formal industriousness, perhaps written up in my head by Gissing or Gogol, with stern-faced clerks hard at work on endless hand-written invoices and inventory lists...

Mercedes López de Heredia was the one who greeted us. I had never seen her before, but within about a minute I felt like I had known her for a long time. It was the same notion I had upon meeting her sister María José a year before. The ladies seem to have a talent for making one feel welcome and at ease. “María José will be joining us shortly,” Mercedes said, as we sat down in the bodega’s offices to chat a bit.

It puzzled Mercedes that, as passionate and vocal as I have been over the past years about her family’s wines, I had never visited the bodega before. Perhaps I mumbled words to the effect of having been too busy drinking—or something equally silly. But what I really should have said was that in my head, the fantastic Viña Tondonias and Viña Bosconias I had tasted throughout my life seemed to come from a magical place, more fantasy than fact. And one is very protective of one’s fantasies... I may have been shy to face the mechanics behind the magic.

Have I mentioned that these people make extraordinary wines that live incredibly long? Have I mentioned that this house, though its high standards of quality have been constant for 127 years, has encountered some very harsh detractors along the way? That their vision and their methods are referred to by some critics as “absurdly retrograde,” even if they have yielded some of the greatest wines in recent Spanish history? That up until very recently these wines were unknown to the vast wave of new wine lovers in Spain and elsewhere? Have I mentioned that my accolades for, say, a sixty-year-old Viña Bosconia, were the catalysts for some of the evil catfi—er, intellectual discussions of which I complained earlier? Forgive me if I bring this up too often. There are certain things that make me sizzle up.

And they do the same, as is very apparent, for the López de Heredia sisters. When María José arrives, the conversation Camilo and I had been having with Mercedes jumps up several notches in speed, volume and passionate intensity. Some things are quickly made clear. The sisters take great pride in their family’s accomplishments. They believe the way their ancestors did things in the vineyard and winery is right and are they will not be the ones to mess with it (so, for those of you who have been fearing the “demise of traditional Rioja,” rest easy: we’ll always have Tondonia). They have often had to answer in the negative to those who propose that they add a “New Wave” wine to their portfolio in order to cater to the “changing tastes” of the masses.

The phrase “bodegas históricas de Rioja” jumps to my mind as I listen to the Mercedes and María José. It is used in reference to the houses that have been making wine in the region for more than a century: Marqués de Riscal, Marqués de Murrieta, López de heredia, La Rioja Alta... These bodegas have made history. It occurs to me that the way in which they keep making history is through understanding of what they did—the correct and the incorrect—in the past and applying that understanding to the present. Some have opted to “go with the flow” and, though they are conscious of the past, are also on the cutting edge of contemporary technology. López de Heredia seems happy to let the flow go with it, for a change.

There’s some irony in the fact that this bodega, when it was first founded in 1877, was a thoroughly modern enterprise, at the forefront of technology and with a truly modern visionary at its helm (for what else can we call someone who embraced technological and economic progress in the way the first Don Rafael López de Heredia did?). Now, 128 years later, the enterprise is led by these two dynamic young women (and their brother Julio César, who oversees the vineyards) and is considered a bastion of the staunchest traditionalism. Where the children of other prestigious Rioja winemaking families are looking toward the next technological revolution, the López de Heredias just want to keep doing really well by the models of the past. And to hell with fahsion, classics will always endure.

In that office we talked. And talked. And talked. We talked until the afternoon had almost been eaten away by our conversation. We decided to continue as we went on a tour of the bodega. Mercedes repeated to me several times that she had been a little anxious about what she would give me to taste, since I seem to have tried everything made by the bodega in the the last 80 years. I was tempted to smirk and say that there are experiences I certainly wouldn’t mind repeating. But that’s just not what I do... So I simply said we should play things by ear. María José left us, promising to rejoin us right before dinnertime. She had some business to take care of. Mercedes was in charge of guiding us and telling us what was what.

The heady funk that surrounds a winery after the first fermentations of its wines have been completed always catches me by surprise. It’s a smell I can never get used to. As we walked into the main fermentation facility at López de Heredia, the pong was powerful. Fermentation vats were being cleaned out of grape solids after the new wine had been transferred to barrels. It took me only a few seconds to realize that, except for the metal of certain pieces of machinery, the dominant material in this hall was oak. There were no panels indicating the presence of temperature-control devices (temperature control, in fact, is left up to the benevolent climate of Rioja at López de Heredia), no robotics; the whole thing is brazenly lo-tech...

The 240-hectoliter vats that line the room are made of American oak. They are old and they show it, their interiors covered in tartrate crystals. This covering, Mercedes explains, makes the vats no less ‘clean’ than the stainless steel ones used by other bodegas. The wine comes into contact with the tartrate formations, not the wood. I still asked whether it wouldn’t be better in terms of upkeep to switch to steel. The reply was complex and it led to a wonderful anecdote about Mercedes recently introducing stainless steel bottle cages into de bodega. It seems that her father was not amused. He thought the steel units looked cold and “ugly” beside the existing wooden ones they were meant to supplement.

The aesthetics of old oak at odds with those of stainless steel... Who would have thought?

We next went into the López de Heredia cooperage. There, everything from the truncated-cone-shaped harvesting receptacles called “comportas” to the barrels for ageing wine are constantly manufactured or repaired. The bodega works only with American oak and barrels are rigorously maintained. Sometimes, individual staves of an old barrel will be replaced if they appear damaged or otherwise dodgy. Alas, they are not replaced by “fresher” old staves, but by staves of new wood. So, in a roundabout sort of way, that supertraditional Gravonia, Tondonia or Bosconia which we thought never saw new oak may have seen some—albeit an almost negligible bit—after all.

The importance of certain other things quickly becomes obvious as one walks deeper into the López de Heredia buildings. Dust happens and the folks at the bodega are happy to let it be so. What collects on a bottle that has been resting for years in one of the bodega’s calado is something beyond dirt. It’s a badge of history.

Of course, some people fixate on utter asepsia in wineries to a point that confuses matters. Apart from the dust, we saw other things on the walls of those caves where the great López de Heredia wines are kept (Factoid: the calado was dug up manually in the early 1890s) that would have horrified your average neat freak. There’s what Mercedes and María José proudly refer to as their very own “microflora,” several varieties of fungi that thrive all over the bodega, on walls and bottles. There are also the spiders, which are a vital part of what seems to be an ecosystem all of its own. The spiders earn their keep by eating up other insects that could do harm to the structure and the holdings of the bodega. A strange application fo Biodynamics beyond the ground, indeed...

Several times during our tour of the bodega, I brought up the contentions I had often heard or read about “lack of hygiene” at a traditional bodega like López de Heredia. I asked if there had ever been an extensive TCA problem at the bodega, such as had occurred in other prestigious Rioja houses in recent years. I was aware that the great TCA crises had happened not because of faulty corks, but because of TCA in the wooden structures of the bodegas. Following the logic of those who condemn López de Heredia as “unhygienic,” I would have thought that in a place with so much old wood, plus so much mould and bacterial action, quite a few catastrophes would have occurred by now. But Mercedes assured me that this has not been the case at all. She spoke of the great care they give to their barrels and made me remember that using new oak isn’t always equal to using clean oak for one’s wines.

And what about wine “defects” caused by brettanomyces and other similar nasties? There the answer is that what happens is no more than what would happen elsewhere, nature being what it is. As I stood in the calado, thinking back through the years and the many bottles of López de Heredia wines I’ve drunk, I honestly could only remember a very small minority of them being defective in any way. In spite of what the advocates of new oak and the hypersanitary winemaking environment may say, in this case one can’t argue with results.

We arrived at the bodega’s “cementerio,” the area where the treasured old vintages are kept and where we were to taste a couple of López de Heredia rarities. At that point, having walked through most of the bodega, I realized something had been missing all along: There were absolutely no large-format bottles to be found. Mercedes told me that López de Heredia had never bottled magnums or any other large formats. It seems that they weren’t “commercially viable”. A shame. Knowing how well their iwnes age, tasting, say, a 1947 Bosconia Gran Reserva from magnum would be a true privilege (not that tasting it from 750 ml. bottles isn’t, but one dares to dream).

That there was some food to accompany our tasting in the “cementerio” was a blessing. In my rush to arrive promptly at three o’clock, I had neglected to stop for lunch. Both Camilo and I were starving. That the tasting was to be small was also a good thing. Later, we were to go to diner with María José, Mercedes and a couple of other friends in the Rioja wine business. I had gotten wind that there were going to be quite a few exceptional bottles at play.

So, what did Mercedes López de Heredia pull out for the man who—she thought—had “tasted it all?” The first time I met María José, a year earlier in London, she opened for me a wine I didn’t know existed: The 1963 Viña Zaconia. I had expressed curiosity about some names I saw listed on the bottle as made by López de Heredia: “Viña Medokkia”, “Viña Romania” and such. Having heard from her sister about that curiosity of mine, Mercedes had tracked down a bottle of Viña Romania 1963 (the vintage is not mentioned on the label, but it does state that it is a wine bottled after five years in barrel and that the wine was bottled in 1968, so the math is simple...). I had assumed that the whole “Romania” thing had to do with the old folks at López de Heredia wanting to do a take-off on “Romanée” and that the wine would be red. But no, it was a golden amber color. Mercedes told me that we would be tasting this wine for the first time together, since she hadn’t had a chance to open a bottle before.

But before I get to the Romania, there is another tasting worth mention. Camilo had never tried a Tondonia Blanco. I mentioned this to Mercedes during our tour of the calado and she pulled out one bottle from a niche. Camilo would be a Tondonia Blanco virgin no more. And get this: Mercedes was not starting him off with some mere Reserva. My friend would have his first experience of these great white Riojas at the very top, with a wine from one of the greatest vintages of the twentieth century, 1964.

Starting at the top like that. Some guys are just born lucky...

So this was how we found ourselves tasting the 1964 R. López de Heredia, Viña Tondonia Blanco Gran Reserva, Rioja. A magnificent nose of earth, spices, honey, toasted nuts, lemon peel and crushed strawberries. Bold and expansive in the mouth, with the mighty core of vibrant acidity characteristic of white Tondonia. Long and layered. A lovely wine.

The 1963 R. López de Heredia, Viña Romania, Rioja pulls the same sort of upset for me that its Zaconia sibling did a year before. Where I was led to expect a dessert wine, what I find is a gorgeous semisweet drink that would work better as an apéritfi or a postprandial than anything else. Nutty and toasty, with multilayered aromas of dried bay leaf, clay and flint. Discreet sweetness in a plush mouthfeel. Not very long, but fades out with a pretty set of almondy harmonics.

Six hours had passed since Camilo and I arrived at Lóez de Heredia. The time had flown. I felt like I had too many questions left to ask. Technical stuff unfit for the table. I hadn’t tried any of the new wines from the 2004 vintage. I hadn’t been to the legendary vineyards (Tondonia, Zaco, el Bosque; then again, a freezing rain had been falling all afternoon, so a trip outside wasn’t such a good idea). “It took me a while to get here, but now that I know the way, don’t be surprised if I show up very often” was what I said as we left the bodega to go and join our other friends for dinner.

1.2. Dinner with a Few New Friends and a Few Old Wines

I don’t like generalizations at all. Cliché generalizations I like even less. But I must say that the tourist guidebooks and the soppy article about Rioja in the Iberia magazine were right: Riojanos are very warm and friendly people. In that sense, the wonderful hospitality of the López de Heredia sisters should not have struck me at all.

Here I was at Las Duelas, finally meeting a guy with whom I had exchanged countless e-mails, whom I considered a good friend, even though we had never been in the same room together. Truth be told, without Jesús Madrazo, my little junket to Rioja would have been a difficult affair. But he took it upon himself to help out and proved utterly invaluable. Reservations in hotels that were fully booked, visits to bodegas—You mentioned to Jesús that you were worried about getting in somewhere and next thing you knew, he simply told you “it’s all taken care of...”

Jesús, apart from all this, is one of the most respected young winemakers in all of Spain. The wines he makes at Contino have garnered him all sorts of honors and great press. They are wines of the “New Rioja” persuasion. This may contradict most of what people believe I stand for, but I like the wines Jesús makes.

Rounding out our little group was José Armendáriz, a quality consultant who specializes in cork quality control for bodegas in Rioja and elsewhere in Spain. Corks being his thing, I asked José if he knew the great Stuart Yaniger, since anyone who is in the business of bottle closures should definitely know this illustrious personage and know him well. José said he didn’t. “Remind me that I need to introduce you guys,” I said.

We sat down at the table. Jesús, though the harvest was long over, had managed to get chef Juan Nales to make for us the famous Las Duelas “Harvester’s Menu”. Wine began to flow almost at the same speed as our lively talk.

The only dry white on offer comes first. It’s the 1970 Marqués de Murrieta, “Castillo de Ygay” Blanco Gran Reserva, Rioja. Deep golden color. A whiff of oxidation precedes aromas of quince, golden apples, roasted almond, dried peach and a distinct granitic vibe. An intriguing nose. In the mouth, after a burst of fruit and nuts, the wine clamps down hard. The finish, though quite long, is a lean, tense, vividly acidic one. This one still needs plenty of time in the bottle.

A subject of frequent discussion among New York Rioja geeks is whether 1981, a sleeper that has produced some very elegant, exquisitely structured wines, was a better vintage than the bolder, riper 1982. Jesús had gotten wind of these discussions and he wanted me to try a 1982 Contino, Reserva, Rioja at the source. I had often said that I liked the ’81 better, but Mr. Madrazo wanted to complicate my life... And so, I was confronted with a powerful, toasty, deeply-cherried wine. Compact and round, with a tight tannic core wrapped in velvety textures. A very delicious, complete Contino with good length and focus. It reminds me of the ’76 in the way it provides gratification. Better than the ’81? I don’t know. Rather, they are much different wines. The ’81 takes its time to open up and become eloquent. The ’82 works on a louder, more immediately impacting register.

Another Contino followed, the 1978 Contino, Reserva, Rioja. This one sort of reminds me of the ’78 Bosconia. Slightly reductive, with notes of brown sugar and a faint horsey element. Earthy and flavorful in the mouth (black plum, toffee), with a husky-voiced, subtly elegant and long finish.

Next up came a favorite from the year of my birth (so few good wines made, and of those few, almost none payable). The 1968 R. López de Heredia, “Viña Bosconia” Gran Reserva, Rioja suffered from slight volatility initially. But once that blew over, there emerged aromas of rose petals, chocolate, tobacco leaves, plum and earth. Nervy and bright on the palate, with the acidity and tannins surprisingly vibrant and protagonistic. Opens up to a pretty spiciness that carries through the long finish.

At this point I need to say something about Chef Nales’ fabulous “Harvester’s Menu”. All the dishes were reinterpretations of traditional rioja fare, like fried breadcrumbs and chorizo topped with late-harvest Tempranillo grapes and patatas riojanas. Everything was skillfully prepared and thoroughly satisfying, giving equal time to tradition and imagination.

The pièce de resistance among the red wines came along next. The 1946 Marqués de Riscal, Reserva, Rioja simply blew everything else away and left me thinking that Riscal’s magnificent run on the ’45, ’46 and ’47 vintages was almost unbelievable. A dramatic wine, with its Cabernet component playing extremely well. Blackcurrant, cherry and raspberry manifest themselves with amazing freshness on the nose, interlaced with notes of earth, well-cured tobacco, cedar and clove. Fantastically deep, gorgeous and long.

I get peculiar with wines like that ’46 Riscal. When such wines happen, my brain just wants to stay with them for the rest of the evening, maybe even beyond. I tend to ignore whatever has the misfortune of following them. But the first dessert wine of our evening had a story attached to it that suspended all reveries and got me right back into the proceedings. It was the 1939 CVNE, “Corona” Semidulce, Rioja. Apparently, not too long ago, during a renovation project at the CVNE bodega in Haro, a wall was torn down. Behind it, the construction workers found a niche full of bottles of a golden-colored old white wine. The workers were getting ready to dispose of this wine in the way workers tend to, that is by a summary splitting up and guzzling of the spoils, but Basilio Izquierdo, the senior winemaker at CVNE, ordered them to take the bottles to a safe area, open them and pour the contents into a vat. Don’t ask me how Mr. Izquierdo ascertained the identity of this “lost” wine, but he did. Was it a stash from the uncertain years after the Spanish Civil War? How could that whole niche of wine simply “get lost?” From the vat, the wine was re-bottled and labeled properly. And now we were getting ready to drink it.

Was the wine worthy of the tale?

Indeed it was. A compelling perfume that immediately brought to my mind the pines that grow on the banks of the Ebro (more like a mixture of pepper and lavender than the Christmas-tree smell we know on this side of the Atlantic). There are also notes of apple compote, lemon zest, orange zest, elderflower and clay. Medium-sweet in the mouth, with a lively grapefruit current running through it. A long and complex finish with hints of tangerine and flowers.

Of course, my pleasure would soon be compounded. It turned out that the bottle we had opened had been brought by Jesús and that María José López de Heredia had pulled a bottle of exactly the same wine from her personal collection for this dinner. So, an extra bottle... Which all these kind Riojanos agreed I should take back to New York with me for enjoyment at a later date.

What can I say? I guess I was also born lucky, in my own way...

Mercedes had brought along another bottle of the Viña Romania we had tasted at her bodega earlier. No sense leaving the joy of such a rare wine down there, when there were Jesús and José to share it with. The second bottle, after the food, felt sightly nuttier, reminiscent of a fine Amontillado, but with a certain something that made it very distinctly Rioja.

The last wine in our dessert trio I had brought. When I landed on Madrid a few days earlier, I went out to dinner with my friend Laureano Serres. Laureano is an up-and-coming young winemaker in the Terra Alta denomination of Cataluña. We dined at El Chaflán, a fashionable “New Iberian Creative” joint. We drank a lot.

At the end of our meal, Laureano pulled a lovely surprise on me. He had brought with him from home an amber-colored liquid in a squarish bottle not unlike those used for fine olive oil. He told me it was a rancio dessert wine made by his father from Garnacha grapes in 1975 and he wanted me to taste it.

I did, but having imbibed way too much during dinner, we left a lot of this heirloom wine still in the bottle. Laureano recorked it. He said: “You’re going to eat with Jsús Madrazo soon, right? I want you to take this and have him try it. And I want you to try it again”.

Naturally, I complied. And so, at Las Duelas a few days after that dinner with Laureano, I was drinking the 1975 Serres, Rancio de Garnacha, Cataluña. The nose is an odd but beautiful one: Bamboo shoots, bread pudding, a whiff of volatility of the kind that would make a nice Madeira “high-toned,” orange peel, tea, walnuts... A plush and complex sweet wine. It’s completely honest about its rusticity and that only adds to its soulwarming charm. Great length, too. A fine accomplishment. Perhaps Laureano should consider making this kind of stuff, instead of trying to make red table wine. If his father could do it this well, I see continuing his work as a worthwhile legacy.

It was either very late or very early when we left Las Duelas, laughing like college kids and planning all sorts of parties for the next few days. Of course, it would be impossible for me to attend those parties, logistically and physically, given the rigorous schedule I had set for myself in Rioja. But the thought was a beautiful one to fall asleep on. The temperature had dropped considerably. It was raining. Luckily, the hotel was just across the street...

To Be Continued