reserva
(at least twenty-four months in oak and three years in the bottle).
Crianzas
, released just two years after vintage, are apt to have a strawberry-vanilla freshness, whereas the
reservas
and
gran reservas
will exhibit the mellow, secondary flavors associated with age—flavors evocative of autumn rather than summer. And those with bottle age can suggest practically the entire spice rack, not to mention the cigar box and the tack room. Somehow you get the idea that this is how red wine used to taste.
If the old school had a central campus, it would be a series of buildings clustered around the railroad tracks at the edge of the medieval town of Haro, including the bodegas Muga and López de Heredia. Both wineries keep several coopers employed year-round, making and repairing barrels and maintaining the huge
tinas
—the swimming-pool-sized oak vats in which the wine is fermented and stored; old oak doesn’t impart a woody flavor to wine, and both wineries believe it’s superior to stainless steel. Both houses are also run by the direct descendants of their founders. If some evil genie told me I could drink just one producer’s Rioja from now on, I would certainly choose Muga. In addition to its old-school wines, notably the
gran reserva
, which spends three years in old American oak barrels, Muga does make a more modern expression of Rioja with French oak under the Torre Mugalabel, including a new postmodern luxury cuvée called Aro. Not so López de Heredia, the hardest-core reactionaries of Rioja, makers of Viña Tondonia.
Tondonia is one of those secret passwords whereby serious wine wonks recognize their own kind. (Impress your sommelier, or put him on the defensive, by asking for it.) The winery was founded in 1877, and apparently very little has changed in terms of winemaking since. The Tondonia vineyard is beautifully situated on a high south-facing plateau outside Haro. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the winery complex resembles a Swiss or Bavarian village. Inside, it resembles the set of a low-budget horror movie, with ancient and vaguely sinister-looking machinery, huge blackened
tinas
, and a fluffy black mold blanketing almost everything. Some of the vats are as old as the winery itself, and pixieish María José López de Heredia, great-granddaughter of the founder, is convinced that the petrified sediments and natural yeasts in the
tinas
are an important part of the distinct flavor profile of the wines.
Far below the fermentation and storage vats, in a series of tunnels carved out of the limestone, tens of thousands of bottles dating from the 1920s slumber beneath the pillowy mold. “The spiders eat the cork flies,” López de Heredia explains cheerfully as I swipe a vast cobweb off my face. Any minute now, I feel certain, Vincent Price is going to jump out at me. The sense of eeriness is gradually dispelled, replaced by a mounting sense of exhilaration and wonder as López de Heredia uncorks bottles in the subterranean tasting room. I start with, of all things, a 1995 rosé—this being her idea of ayoung wine—and move on to the ′81 Gran Reserva Blanco, made mostly from the indigenous white grape called Viura, which tastes fresh and lively for its age. The tasting of reds begins with the ethereal ′85 Tondonia, which has an amazing nose of cinnamon, clove, leather, tobacco—the whole spice box. While this may sound like one of those annoying instances where you have to listen to a wine writer tease you with descriptions of stuff you will never see or taste, the fact is that all of these wines have been recently released. In this regard, López de Heredia reminds me of Orson Welles’s embarrassing ad for Paul Masson: “We sell no wine before its time.”
Across the street, Muga is releasing its
gran reservas
on a slightly more accelerated schedule. You can find the ′95 and the ′96 on retailers’ shelves; both have the kind of spicy complexity that develops only with age and
(at least twenty-four months in oak and three years in the bottle).
Crianzas
, released just two years after vintage, are apt to have a strawberry-vanilla freshness, whereas the
reservas
and
gran reservas
will exhibit the mellow, secondary flavors associated with age—flavors evocative of autumn rather than summer. And those with bottle age can suggest practically the entire spice rack, not to mention the cigar box and the tack room. Somehow you get the idea that this is how red wine used to taste.
If the old school had a central campus, it would be a series of buildings clustered around the railroad tracks at the edge of the medieval town of Haro, including the bodegas Muga and López de Heredia. Both wineries keep several coopers employed year-round, making and repairing barrels and maintaining the huge
tinas
—the swimming-pool-sized oak vats in which the wine is fermented and stored; old oak doesn’t impart a woody flavor to wine, and both wineries believe it’s superior to stainless steel. Both houses are also run by the direct descendants of their founders. If some evil genie told me I could drink just one producer’s Rioja from now on, I would certainly choose Muga. In addition to its old-school wines, notably the
gran reserva
, which spends three years in old American oak barrels, Muga does make a more modern expression of Rioja with French oak under the Torre Mugalabel, including a new postmodern luxury cuvée called Aro. Not so López de Heredia, the hardest-core reactionaries of Rioja, makers of Viña Tondonia.
Tondonia is one of those secret passwords whereby serious wine wonks recognize their own kind. (Impress your sommelier, or put him on the defensive, by asking for it.) The winery was founded in 1877, and apparently very little has changed in terms of winemaking since. The Tondonia vineyard is beautifully situated on a high south-facing plateau outside Haro. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the winery complex resembles a Swiss or Bavarian village. Inside, it resembles the set of a low-budget horror movie, with ancient and vaguely sinister-looking machinery, huge blackened
tinas
, and a fluffy black mold blanketing almost everything. Some of the vats are as old as the winery itself, and pixieish María José López de Heredia, great-granddaughter of the founder, is convinced that the petrified sediments and natural yeasts in the
tinas
are an important part of the distinct flavor profile of the wines.
Far below the fermentation and storage vats, in a series of tunnels carved out of the limestone, tens of thousands of bottles dating from the 1920s slumber beneath the pillowy mold. “The spiders eat the cork flies,” López de Heredia explains cheerfully as I swipe a vast cobweb off my face. Any minute now, I feel certain, Vincent Price is going to jump out at me. The sense of eeriness is gradually dispelled, replaced by a mounting sense of exhilaration and wonder as López de Heredia uncorks bottles in the subterranean tasting room. I start with, of all things, a 1995 rosé—this being her idea of ayoung wine—and move on to the ′81 Gran Reserva Blanco, made mostly from the indigenous white grape called Viura, which tastes fresh and lively for its age. The tasting of reds begins with the ethereal ′85 Tondonia, which has an amazing nose of cinnamon, clove, leather, tobacco—the whole spice box. While this may sound like one of those annoying instances where you have to listen to a wine writer tease you with descriptions of stuff you will never see or taste, the fact is that all of these wines have been recently released. In this regard, López de Heredia reminds me of Orson Welles’s embarrassing ad for Paul Masson: “We sell no wine before its time.”
Across the street, Muga is releasing its
gran reservas
on a slightly more accelerated schedule. You can find the ′95 and the ′96 on retailers’ shelves; both have the kind of spicy complexity that develops only with age and
Similar Books
