The DOC Rioja has just announced they’ve approved the latest group of “Viñedos Singulares” (VS) or single-vineyard parcels in the region. This brings the total certified now to 162 which cover an area of 265ha.
This may sound like large amount, but with 65,326ha in total surface area within the DO, it represents only 0.4% of all the vineyards. Thus, unlike other regions in Spain, while there’s been a significant uptick in recent years since being introduced in 2017, these single vineyards are but a very small part of the overall region.
The big question of course is how many vineyards within the region of Rioja merit being elevated to this level?
On Hudin.com, there have been VS tastings in 2022 as well as in 2023 that showed the overall quality of the resulting wines to be quite high.
Additional VS wines were tasted in the 2024 report that was released this past July and showed that the quality remains high, especially in the case of the Quiñón de Valmira (added in 2022) from Palacios Remondo that was one of the highest-scoring wines this year. A new entry to the list this year also includes the Finca el Foro by Arizcuren which has repeatedly scored well on this site.
The question remains as to how the segment will progress going forward as while there are 162 individual VS registrations, there are only 97 owners showing that there are some entities which have seen it as something of a branding advantage to register a great many VS parcels. For example, Bodegas Valdelana owns 10, The cooperative of Sonsierra owns nine, and Luis Cañas owns eight.
Will it be the case that wineries such as these will promote all their VS holdings as being worthy of the designation? Or will it fall more into place that wineries like Palacios Remondo, who only promote a singular, top-level vineyard will do so? And more importantly, will smaller wineries that have been producing high-regarded, single-vineyard wines for some time, but haven’t bothered to register them, decide that the time is right to join this certification and boost its overall quality?
These are the questions that remain to be answered in what is a very new system in a very old wine region in Spain where blending used to be king. Clearly additional tasting going forward will help to see how this sorts out and how much the control board is wanting to decide what gets promoted and how much will be decided by the consumer.
2 responses to “Rioja’s new Viñedos Singulares”
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I hope some serious rigor is in place, or it’s running the risk of becoming like Chianti’s Gran Selezione, where the only common denominator is the price tag.
Yeah, we’ll see how it goes. So far, pretty decent.
One of the big problems of Chianti is that Gran Selezione is anything but a ‘selection’ and based more on stipulations like alcohol and aging which is incredibly antiquated in this day and age. Very similar to how there’s a lot of dreck in the Reserva and Gran Reserva wines of Rioja.