in the year of our Lord, 1970
Team, we have a lot of catching up to do!
Typically I like to start these blogs off with “housekeeping” items before moving on to any “new business.” In part, because that’s just how my brain works, but also in part because lots happen in between blogs that I feel I have to get out into the ethos.
Hell if it worked in 2021, why not keep that same process going into 2022.
(That was supposed to be sarcastic by the way, hard to pull off in the written word…)
As the date on my last post would indicate, these blogs are hard to get to. And while I can’t commit to a steady cadence and frequency, this blog does indeed have gas left in the tank.
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So, now that my monthly kvetching is done, let’s talk about some wine!
And bro, do I have stories to talk about. Here’s a bit to look forward to this year:
Bubbles, [Redacted], and error missing file memory.exe
All I want for Christmas is wine
Desde Lupita
England is for (Wine) lovers
So, your flight is delayed 6 hours in SFO
How it’s made #3 - buying futures in wine
These aren't the grapes you're looking for
Starting the year off with a single wine I had a few months back that has just stuck with me. At first, because of its age (this wine had some wisdom to it!) but after a few days I did some digging and turns out there’s actually a really cool story behind it.
More on that in a sec, but first, let’s pause to pontificate about age and wine…
don’t care how, I want it now!
There’s this great article written prior to our global contagion that talks about age and wine, and why it’s so hard to put anything away for more than 12 minutes, let alone 12 months or god forbid 12 years.
In short, as we the people have grown to be accustomed to immediacy (I’m talking about you Amazon), that also has had a direct impact on the wine world.
Wine lovers no longer necessarily have cellars or the means or space to construct one. Those who would enjoy drinking age-worthy wines are much more likely to live in fourth-floor walk-up apartments in Brooklyn or Tokyo than they are to occupy stately manors.
An adage had it that you drank wine cellared by your parents, and bought wine for your children. But those “Downton Abbey” days are long gone.
I mean think about it. If you were going to buy a wine today from your local wine shop (please support retail), odds are that vintage isn’t going to be anything crazily old. For one, the shop can’t hold on to inventory that long. For two, if you’re going to buy from the “new world” there’s a marginally smaller pool of aged wines that even exist. You don’t see alot of 1920 vintages from anyplace in America do you? For three, even old-world regions still have to produce and sell wine annually, whereby the négociants, wine merchants, etc. have to move product to distributors and resellers, down the chain and so on and so on. Everyone has to pay their mortgage/rent, so holding on to inventory just isn’t realistic. This is pretty much the case in any wine region, except for Spain.
The Spaniards have patience.
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It’s not uncommon for a Spanish producer to hold, say, a Gran Reserva level wine back for several years past the wine’s “technically available” release date, simply because they don’t think the wine is where they want it to be.
This brings us to our wine for this post. An absolutely stunning Bodegas Riojanas Rioja Monte Real Gran Reserva from 1970.
One Cool Thing
In Rioja - the Wine tells you when it’s ready.
it’s a different type of Spanish
Spanish wine, and in particular bottles from either Rioja or Priorat, are some of my favorites that I’ll come across.
In part because of the valu - Bleh, I almost hate myself for writing that, it’s like saying “FOMO” *gag* - it’s a wine trope, but anyway… it’s true.
You don’t often find high-quality aged wines at such an affordable price, particularly when you’re comparing the wine at the region's highest level to a Premie Cru Burgundy, Reserve Napa Cab, or 1st Growth Bordeaux.
As with almost anything wine-related, our friends over at Wine Folly have you covered if you want to read more about the Denominación de Origen Calificada (DOCa) or the reserve levels of Rioja.
But the most important part of our story is this wine was a Gran Reserva level, wines which are selected from exceptional vintages and have spent at least 2 years in oak and 3 years in the bottle. Having had this wine exist for several years prior to my arrival on this blue sphere, I went back and did some digging on the vintage quality.
If you’re curious, according to decanter, 1970 was “Another ‘nearly’ year with many top producers making excellent wines,” and that seems to be echoed by the actual DOCa, ranking it a “Very Good” harvest. The top-level being “Excellent.”
BUT, aside from this being a good vintage all things considered. The 1970s were a major turning point for wineries in Rioja.
I liked Rioja before they went all mainstream
I won’t give you the full history of wine in Rioja, but in short, the region was “discovered” in the 19th century thanks to phylloxera. Wine négociants from Bordeaux traveled down south to essentially make up for their lack of being able to produce wines back home. At that time their vines were quite literally being starved to death by the phylloxera pandemic. There’s a lot of important history I’m skipping over from the late 1800s to 1970, BUT by most wine expert accounts, until the 1970s, most Rioja was juicy stuff made by small-scale farmers.
Fortunately for our heroes Bodegas Riojanas - their tenure and experience in winemaking - having found their home in 1890 - positioned them well for making wines that would be around 50 years later.
Rather than being founded in the commercial hub of Haro—as many prominent bodegas were—Riojanas is in the very heart of Rioja at Cenicero where its owners, the Artacho family, have been growers for generations.
Because of this, Riojanas has long had the luxury of complete control, from vine to bottle, of much of its production, from prized sites in its home village. Cenicero’s terroir has long been revered as the source of some of the very best Riojas, complete wines that combine the elegant structure of Rioja Alta with the full body of Rioja Alavesa.
After 1970, French Oak was embraced by more in the winemaking process, as opposed to the traditional American Oak used in the region, and economic recovery efforts (from you know… world wars), saw more infrastructure come to the region, which brought more wineries to the area who were initially backed by multinational corporations. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
what did it taste like
This was such a great example of a finely aged wine. Again, the thing was 52 years young, and by the way, it was a spry 50. Like the actor, Jamie Foxx, who I bet until just now you probably thought was maybe early to mid-40s. It has a gorgeous garnet/brickish red to it, and structurally, it was every bit just as vibrant as any current “reserve” level vintage. Some of the fruit was still there, but the bright, oaky signs (vanilla, coconut, etc.) had long since faded away. Really two things jumped out at me right off the bat, its tertiary aromas of cedar/cigar box, and dare I say, truffle?
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My friends will get a kick out of this, but I couldn’t stop smelling the wine's bouquet. I was obsessed! It developed over the hour or so we had dinner, but I was happy that the wine didn’t fall apart by the end of the night. Pretty crazy for a wine that was, I don’t know, probably only 4,500 Spanish Pesetas ($30 USD) when it was initially sold.
- Dustin