It’s the case that I’ve been tasting a decent swath of wines from Rioja lately. This is mainly just to see what’s out there these days as in general, I stay quite uninformed as to what is happening in Spain’s most well-known region. Why is this? Well, for the most part it’s due to there being little wine coming from the region that I find terribly interesting. While Spain has managed to get Tempranillo on the tips of any Anglophone’s tongue, they’ve yet to figure out how to make an engaging wine from it that has little more than red fruits and toasted barrel notes. This isn’t to say that I misguidedly think Rioja wines are bad. They are all generally decent at worst which is a pretty good place to be in. If you want a glass of basic red wine, Rioja is there for you and this is why it’s unfortunately more common in Barcelona restaurants than Catalan wines.
Here’s the problem in that there are so many decent wines from the region, it gets hard to find any that start to be crank it up to say 8, let alone the almighty 11. This sample from González Puras stood out though and has a good deal more character than the other wines that I’ve been tasting. Naturally with 600 wineries or so in Rioja, I have plenty more to taste before I can say that I “know” Rioja. Still, wines such as this are a good starting point and while the price is twice what someone might think a Rioja should cost, this, or even a little more is what they should really be paying so that producers can start to make wines that show off a bit more of their locale.
