While Sticking Close to Tradition, Rioja Changes With the Times

On a windblown plateau 520 meters up the scruffy shoulder of the Sierra de Yerga, 47-year-old, head-trained Garnacha vines twisted up out of limestone soil, each pruned into three stout branches topped by a mop of early spring leaves. Walking the rows, Rosana Lisa, director of innovation and premium winemaking projects for Bodegas Ramón Bilbao, instructed me in suckering the plants. I stooped and plucked spindly, stray shoots, grooming the main varietal in Lalomba Finca Lalinde, the rosado I had enjoyed at lunch.

I had just arrived in Rioja, and it seemed strange to begin an exploration of this fabled red wine region with a rosé wine, yet that is how Lisa had introduced her work, with a meal and a visit to this vineyard, Finca Lalinde, in Rioja Oriental, one of three subzones. “Lalomba, the single-estate label, is the evolution of our company,” she says, “because Ramón Bilbao is about master blending. But in the last 12 years, we’ve been studying soils to make the terroir translate from the grape to the wine.”

Bone-dry with terrific minerality and food-friendly grip, the rosado had complemented seafood tapas, but it’s notable not only for its pairing potential. With its single-vineyard designation, its vinification in concrete, and even its pale color—achieved in part by the addition of 10 percent of the white grape Viura—Lalomba Finca Lalinde exemplifies the change afoot in one of the world’s most hidebound wine regions.

The Rioja Denominación de Origen Calificada, or DOCa, is Spain’s oldest regulated region, established in 1925. Winemaking here goes back at least to the Romans in the second century B.C.E., and perhaps 900 years earlier to the Phoenicians. But the historic hallmark of Rioja, its lengthy oak aging, has its roots in two infestations—powdery mildew and phylloxera—that ravaged French vineyards in the mid-1800s. French winemakers turned to Spain for untainted grapes, bringing with them their 225-liter barrels and their maturation techniques. To this day, the basis of Rioja’s classification is how long a wine has aged.

For red wines, which make up more than 90 percent of production, the aging requirement is two years for a Crianza, at least one of those in barrel; three years for a Reserva, with one in barrel; and five years for a Gran Reserva, two in barrel. Traditionally, many wines were aged longer than that, often in an oxidative style.

Despite the French influence, Rioja producers long preferred to age their Tempranillo in American oak barrels, a product of Spanish colonies in the New World. The full-bodied grape is predominant in Rioja’s red blends, comprising close to 80 percent of the region’s nearly 66,000 hectares of plantings. From the 1980s through the early aughts, this big, oaky profile worked well for Rioja. “The most important critic was Robert Parker,” notes Mercedes Garcia Rupérez, winemaker at Bodegas Montecillo. “And the most important wines for him had very intensive expressions of wood in the mouth and nose. So the best awards were always with a lot of wood.”

But tastes change, and the style that made Rioja famous is no longer favored among consumers. So, says Rupérez, “we have passed to aging in barrel with short times and special wood with not too much toast to avoid these intensive notes of wood that cover the flavor in the wine.” In place of all the oak and the Tempranillo, producers are elevating terroir and alternative varietals. Montecillo has introduced three new single-varietal Reservas under its Viña Monty label. These include a blackberry-and-herbs Graciano and a Garnacha filled with tart cherry flavor, both sourced from select plots. With pronounced fruit flavors pushing against oak notes from the medium-toasted barrels, the wines show a tweaking, but not abandoning, of Rioja’s long-aged formula. “For me, it’s important to adapt with little changes but nothing extreme,” says Rupérez. “We are Rioja. The changes are step by step.”

Having ruled the region with a tight, traditional hand, the Consejo Regulador DOCa Rioja has been slow to keep up with producers. In response, at least one prominent estate, Bodegas Artadi, left the DOCa in 2016 in order to make its own style of wines. Others in the northern zone of Rioja Alavesa, which is located in Basque Country, attempted to form an alternative council, Viñedos de Álava, which the Consejo Regulador DOCa Rioja successfully fought against in court. And within the DOCa, bodegas overseen by a new generation—Sierra de Toloño, Miguel Merino, and others—are eschewing the classifications in order to focus on fresher, more terroir-driven wines. More prominent and established producers like Ramón Bilbao and Rioja’s oldest house, Marqués de Murrieta, founded in 1852, continue to make Crianzas, Reservas, and Gran Reservas, but they’ve also been overhauling their wines.

“We are a very classic winery. But we want a wine that is fruit forward; well balanced with subtle oak; elegant and fresh. So we are offering less time in oak than the classic styles,” says Murrieta owner Vincente Dalmau Cebrián-Sagarriga. “How do you say it in English? You update.” Containing 82 percent Tempranillo but with a balancing dose of acid-driven Mazuelo and Graciano, Marqués de Murrieta Gran Reserva 2016 shows American oak’s sweet signature but with a bright, red-berry profile. “All of us need to be happy that we are inside one of the world’s key wine regions. But Rioja needs to evolve.”

Over time, the Consejo Regulador has agreed with him, lifting restrictions to allow producers to emphasize aspects of the wine other than its aging. In 2008 and 2009, the appellation expanded the list of plantable grapes to 14, including the white international varieties Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Verdejo; the neglected native red grapes Turruntés and Maturana Tinta; and the white grapes Tempranillo Blanco and Maturana Blanca. In 2017, the DOCa went further, allowing zone, village, and Viñedo Singular, or single vineyard, designations. It added a sparkling wine category, Espumosos de Calidad de Rioja; permitted single varietal white wines; and allowed rosados made with a lighter, Provençal-style hue, rather than the traditional, oak-stained dark pink, to carry the Rioja seal.

It’s changes like these that have paved the way for a wine like Lalomba Finca Lalinde. “The average palate thinks of Rioja as this big, bold, robust, dark, intense wine,” says Madeline Maldonado, a sommelier at Ci Siamo and the former beverage director for José Andres’ Mercado Little Spain, both in New York City. “But we are starting to understand there is no monolithic Rioja. We can get into village and vineyard designations. There’s a sense of place, there is a vineyard you can trace the wine back to, there’s vine age, there’s terroir. It’s super exciting, and it’s long overdue.”

It’s not just changing consumer tastes that are pushing Rioja forward. Market and climate pressures are both uprooting old ways. Back at Finca Lalinde, it was a crystal-clear, early May day, and I could see the dark rise of the Pyrenees to the northeast and the Cantabrian Mountains to the northwest, the ranges casting a rain shadow that, in average years, blocks Atlantic storms from soaking the vineyards. As it turned out, 2024 did not prove average. Following 2023’s record drought, Rioja was hit with a deluge during harvest, swelling the grapes to bursting four months after my visit. The Consejo Regulador reported the lowest yields in a century.

Much of the work that Lisa does nowadays is aimed at mitigating such vicissitudes of climate change. She took me to the top of the vineyard at 720 meters high, where a weather station stood sentinel. Tracking relative humidity and temperature, it’s one of several efforts that have allowed her to reduce the use of fungicides by 30 percent.

That’s not Lisa’s only climate-smart initiative. The following day at Ramón Bilbao’s green-roofed winery in the Rioja Alta zone to the west, she poured a wine named Viñedos de Altura, or High-Altitude Vineyards, for the cooler, mountain areas where the grapes are grown—increasingly attractive real estate in Rioja. Blended from the Garnacha I had suckered at Finca Lalinde and Tempranillo grown closer to the winery but at a similar altitude, the wine had spent 15 months in French oak, but what it showed was less its aging than its growing conditions. It had a concentrated intensity from the rocky, mountain soils and a savory, tannic edge from the thick skins the grapes develop to block the UV rays at such a height, but with a balancing freshness that comes from slower ripening amid the high-altitude diurnal swing.

For another of Ramón Bilbao’s newer labels, the white wine called Limitá Norte, Lisa goes to the Obarenes Mountains in Rioja’s far northwest for two indigenous grapes highly adapted to the Atlantic Ocean’s wild-and-woolly influence. “Because of climate change, we are discovering more corners of the region,” she says. With Maturana Blanca bringing floral notes and Tempranillo Blanco adding texture, Limitá Norte is a crisp, high-mountain white with a lush body and heady aromatics.

White wine production in general today is a sign of a changing Rioja. Though whites still account for less than 10 percent of the region’s output, plantings of white varietals have nearly doubled since 2015. “We have fantastic white wines, so we are adapting with the times and to the changes in consumers. It’s very important,” says Ruperéz, whose third single-varietal Viña Monty is a Viura vibrant with apple notes.

Ruperéz’s wine is a Reserva, aged for 18 months in partially new French oak. A Gran Reserva made from 70-year-old Viura grapes grown at the highest elevation on Marqués de Murrieta’s Ygay Estate in Rioja Alta, Capellanía spends 23 months in French oak, 13 months in concrete, and two years in the bottle before release. That’s the kind of aging program you’d expect from Rioja. And, yet, tempered by a creamy body and lengthy palate of its complex maturation process, this single-varietal, single-vineyard white wine shows exuberant fruit and a sense of place. With a pineapple custard flavor and a flinty edge from calcareous-clay soil and high-altitude conditions, it’s a wine born of the best of both worlds: the cellar and the terroir.

One major producer throwing weight behind whites is El Coto de Rioja, which owns more than 1,800 acres of vineyards in the region. They bottle a traditional white blend, a Reserva Chardonnay, a barrel-fermented Chardonnay, a varietal Verdejo, two Sauvignon Blancs, and others. “People said, ‘These guys are crazy. They are investing a lot of money in white here in Rioja,’” says winemaker César Fernández. “But it’s been a huge success.”

A Sauvignon Blanc for which El Coto built a winery just to extract the must on-site and avoid oxidation, Coto Mayor Bianco is all about the terroir of a single block planted 840 meters up, surrounded by oak forest on El Coto’s Finca Carbonera. “It’s a unique expression. I wouldn’t plant this variety in other places at a lower altitude in Rioja,” says Fernández. Stirred on its fine lees for one month, it combines the bristling freshness of its site with a roundness and long, floral finish from the bâttonage.

Fernández takes a similar approach to his top-of-the-line red wine, the 100-percent Tempranillo-based Coto de Imaz Gran Reserva. He controls the oxidation that would have characterized such a wine in the past, and rather than blending many plots, he carefully selects the best old-vine sites from single vineyards. “This is what we call a new version of classicity,” he says.

Still, Bastida was sanguine about the changes in the region. The winery’s Gran Reserva, made only in the best years and sourced from 60-year-old vines in Rioja Alta, is, to this day, aged a full 30 months in American oak barrels. But there is another wine at Ramón Bilbao also made only in exceptional years. It is sourced from 90-year-old Tempranillo vines growing at 650 meters above sea level, and it spends just 18 months in barrels, all of them new French oak. Bastida created this wine, called Mirto, when he joined the winery back in 1999 to indicate a new direction that, as per the winery’s website, “embodies the connection between classic Rioja and the exceptional terroir of the Rioja Alta villages.” In other words, it presupposed the current moment, in which producers are finding the sweet spot between the cellar and vines.

Given the altitude at which its grapes grow, Mirto exhibits a punchy acidity. It has a lushness from its time in barrel and plenty of lees stirring, but little discernible oak flavor or aroma. The vintage I tried was a 2016. A wine that was integrated from the start, it didn’t take 40 years to come together. “The experience is that if you keep the acidity level, then everything else is less important for ageability,” Bastida says. “The style today is different than 40 years ago, and we need to learn from consumers.”