Rioja Red Wines For Beginners

Hello everyone, Trophy Wine Hunter. Welcome back to my YouTube channel. Today I'm starting my series on Rioja as a region. This is one of the areas of preferred drinking and I hope this is going to be exciting for my viewers because I don't really know a lot about Rioja wines. Of course like every other wine drinker I've drank Rioja wines over the years but really not put a lot of focus on it. This first video is really just going to be a basic video covering the region and then as I've done with Barolo and Chambon Roussigny over the course of probably the next two years we're just going to drink a lot of Rioja wines and just from a consumer's perspective or from a taster's perspective kind of discover things about the region. There's different ways you can approach wine, you can be very academic about it but I like to discover things for myself through that learning process and through the tasting process. I think you'll come to conclusions that are very unique to you and also are very much deeper than what a wine expert or what someone else can tell you about a region. So let's start from the basics. So Rioja is a region, a wine region, in northern Spain and it's actually comprised of three sub-regions. Rioja Alta, Rioja Alvesa and Rioja Oriental. Although it's three separate sub-wine regions in terms of administrative regions it actually covers three separate regions instead of just one. There's Rioja, there's Navarra and then also the Basque country. So it's kind of confusing because if you're talking about wine and you're talking about administrative regions they're a little bit different. So let's go through each of them. First let's go with Rioja Alta. So this is located south of the Ebro river on the western edge of this wine region. It's got higher elevations and it's known for producing more what we would consider traditional old world style wines. Because it's got a higher elevation it's got a shorter growing season so it's going to have brighter fruit flavors and generally the wines are going to be lighter on the palate. Next we have Rioja Alvesa as the region. This is located north of the Ebro region and again it's in the Basque region and generally speaking Rioja Alvesa produces fuller body wines that have higher acidity and there's very low density with large spacing between the rows and that's because the soils are relatively terrible in this region and the vines need more distance from each other to get all the nutrients. And last we have Rioja Oriental. Rioja Alta and Rioja Alvesa are more continental climate this is more like Mediterranean climate and it's the warmest and driest of the Rioja regions. So in summer you can have drought like conditions and so in general these are going to be very deeply colored very highly alcoholic wines and typically they're not going to have the same acidity nice acidity aroma that the other two regions will have and typically this is going to be in kind of more used for blending so it's not going to the better wines I would say are going to come from probably if I had to bank on it Rioja Alvesa then Rioja Alta and then Rio Baja. When we talk about the deep dive into Rioja what I mean is the deep dive into the red wines of Rioja that are typically Tempranillo based. The region also produces white wine and rose but I'm not going to focus on those too much and there are also some wines that may not be Tempranillo based but that's very few and far between so basically I'm going to concentrate on red wines using the Tempranillo grape which is the main grape type mostly used in the Rioja region. Generally speaking most of these wines have a little bit of blending so the typical blending is from Grenache, Graziano and Manzuelo grapes. So the history of Rioja is quite long lived back to I think the 13th century most wine was fairly value oriented until really the 1980s. Of course there's exceptions. The other thing to note is unlike many other regions where now single vineyards are very popular still in Rioja it's mostly we deal with what we would call blends. You might see some wines that are just from Rioja where the grapes are only taken from Rioja Alta, Rioja Alvesa but generally speaking the majority of wines are going to be blended from all around Rioja region. With Rioja there's four general classifications based on aging. It has nothing to do with quality by the way it has to do with aging. So the first one is Joven which is basically the youngest wines or what we would call the IGT wine that doesn't fit into their category. I don't see a lot of Joven wines in North America. They should be really well priced and easy drinking. You see them in Spain and so if you go to Spain take advantage of that. They're great wines to drink pop and open lots of fruit delicious but we don't get them very often unfortunately here. Next level up is Crenza wines which are aged at least two years before released and one of those years has to be in oak barrels. The next level up is going to be Reserva which has to be aged three years before released to the market. At least one of those has to be in oak barrels and then the final one is Gran Reserva which is at least five years of aging 24 months in oak and the rest in bottle. And again as I point out this has nothing to do with quality although in general you're going to have a step up in quality because if wineries are going to age a wine that long or put that you know have that in their storage that long and take up that much space in generally they want to sell it a little bit higher price and you know that that's going to be a sign of better quality. So I say in general that would be if I had a choice between a Gran Reserva and a Reserva and all things being equal I would probably take the Gran Reserva. I would expect the Gran Reserva would be more expensive than the Reserva. What can you expect from Rioja wines? Again it's very hard to generalize there are different camps. What I find with Rioja wines is more than any other wine in the world you get this old world smell. So this association with oak is very prevalent with Rioja wines. Again there's exceptions. Some people say it's kind of like Cabernet Sauvignon but fruitier and so it has a good body it's usually good alcohol content and good tannins. I find it a little bit more acidic than Cabernet Sauvignon and a little bit more like the cherry fruits. If you want to go with Pinot Noir some red fruit flavors but more tannic more full body so that type of thing. It can be very aromatic but it's on the kind of vanilla oak type side. That typically when I smell Rioja that's the first thing that I kind of smell like old world and so some people are into that some people are not. Likewise there are producers now that kind of try to de-emphasize the oak but I do think that there probably is some positive influence when you put oak and tampernino together. So I don't know that as a scientific fact but that's kind of what I think most people kind of infer. Now we're going to just start over the next couple of years over the next two years just drinking wines and trying them out and trying to place them in different places. That to me is the best place to learn it's probably not the most efficient way to learn but it's the most for me it's the most individualized or personalized way to learn. Again you can learn about Rioja by just you know studying the course looking at 50 videos you're reading a couple of books but you would have no tasting experience and you might you would know a lot about it from a book perspective but I don't think you would have really insightful personalized views on the wine unless you drink it and that's what drinking has to do you come up with your own hypothesis own views that you can support because you've drank the wines right and so I think that's a really important part of wine drinking and wine appreciation. I think again as many of my viewers and subscribers know I find that in this day and age too many people rely on other people's opinions and rely on what we call so called experts. I'm not knocking experts but I'm saying that especially for a wine that is so individualized everyone's palate is so unique you really have to drink the wines yourselves and then come to those conclusions for yourself and I hope that you know through this process that I will be able to bring some insights with most other YouTube channels that deal with wine and therefore that's the uniqueness of this channel. Hope you've enjoyed this video and until next time happy drinking.