Bordeaux vs Rioja Sommelier Picks The Best Wine

Bordeaux versus Rioja, which makes the best wine. I'm Garry, WSET 3 qualified sommelier, and I've been to both regions quite a lot of times. I know winemakers personally in both places, and I was actually just in Bordeaux a couple of weeks ago and came back from Rioja last week, so let's get into it. If you put basic, maybe under 30 euro Bordeaux next to a Rioja at the same price, I think Rioja wins. Rioja was the first Spanish wine region to get DOC status, it is Denominación de Origen Calificada in Spanish, it is the top classification in Spain, and it's got the tradition and infrastructure to deliver good wine at every level. A Rioja Crianza from a decent producer at 15 euros gives you Tempranillo that spends a year in oak and another year in bottle before it even leaves the winery, so you have a lot of fruit, still fresh fruit, but you have quite a lot of body, so even at this price point it is something worth drinking. And the classification system they use, it is like Hoven, Crianza, Reserva, Gran Reserva, it is probably one of the most useful in the wine world, because it is not ambiguous, Hoven is just young, it is a translation from Spanish, Hoven is young, it is fresh, it has no extended aging, then you have Crianza, that means basically that the wine has been aged a bit, then you have Reserva and Gran Reserva, which have been stored for a long time, first in a barrel, then in the bottle, building complexity that in other regions would cost you maybe twice as much, so you always know what you are getting just looking at the label. And the range is genuinely interesting, because you've got big reliable producers doing excellent work, you have, I don't know, Rioja, Redanza, Reserva for instance, I picked one up recently for just over 30 euros, so it has nine years, fantastic old wine, stunning wine, honestly it's a steal for the price, but then alongside that you've got smaller projects, where you got more personality in the wine, like Pujantha for instance, is a producer who sometimes just doesn't put a Reserva label on their wines, just because they want the flexibility to decide what to release and when to release. That kind of approach gives you wines with real character and they're still very approachable in price. At the same price in Bordeaux, look, the honest truth is you're mostly getting generic Bordeaux AOC, it is thin, it is sometimes green, sometimes the grapes were not very ripe, so sometimes it could be quite harsh on the acidity. The word Bordeaux on the label at that price really tells you not much, I would say. You can find some Centimillion Grand Cru Classé around 25-30 maybe euros, but you need to know exactly which one to grab. And secondly, that is also the price in Bordeaux. If you ship it to the US or to the UK, you are already at 40 plus dollars or pounds category, which is a different conversation entirely. So for a dinner party, for a Tuesday night, I am preaching for Rioja every time at this level. And if you actually want to taste through all of this at the stores, we can go to Rioja or to Bordeaux together. I run private wine tours and you'll have proper access to winemakers, not a bus full of people following a flag. So if you're interested, you have a link in the description for more info. And yeah, but on the upper end, the high end, things shift a little bit and this is where Bordeaux's history is generally hard to argue against. So the 1855 Bordeaux classification is one of the most influential things still even written about wine. It ranked the top chateaus of the Medoc into five growths and most of those rankings have barely moved in 170 years. So here you have Latour, Lafite, Rothschild, Mouton Rothschild. These are not just wines, these are the whole institutions inside of wine history. The properties themselves are something else. There are century-old buildings, perfectly kept estates, these stunning chateaus. But I want to say something honest about Bordeaux as well, because the picture is kind of more complicated than these stunning chateaus, right? It is not about Lafite and Latour and Chateau Paris. There is also a room for smaller, more personal projects everywhere in Bordeaux, in Entre-Deux-Mers. So it is the area sitting between the rivers Garonne and Dordogne. I know personally an Australian winemaker who is completely obsessed with his vines, working at a completely different scale. So he's making genuinely exciting wines, but a very small scale. And when I was a couple of weeks ago in Bordeaux, I was driving through the vineyard. I actually stopped the car in the middle of a very narrow road, because I wanted to film what I was saying. It was the tractors pulling up vines, ripping them out of the ground, literally. Because that is what's happening in Bordeaux, in Entre-Deux-Mers and in some other places right now. A lot of smaller producers are walking away. Not only smaller producers, but the economics don't work at the lower end. So you have the costs of farming, the bad reputation of that generic Bordeaux, the competition from Spain, from the new world wine. So it's pushing people out. The top of Bordeaux is untouchable, very stable, but the gap between the top and the bottom is just enormous. And the bottom is in real trouble right now. Rioja, I would say it is more even. You've got cheap Hoven, that is nothing special, sure. But in the 30 to 40 euro range, Rioja is consistently solid and internationally competitive. The distance between the bottom and the top isn't as extreme as it is in Bordeaux. And that is both a good thing and a limitation. Rioja hasn't built this mythology and history that the great Bordeaux chateaus have, but it is also not leaving half its producers behind. Rioja does have some serious names at the top, like Lopez de Heredia, some of the Marqués de Riscal range even, some of these wines. And they make genuinely world-class wines, no doubt. Marqués de Riscal is actually the most interesting bridge between these two regions, because this bodega, this winery, was founded in the 1860s by a Rioja nobleman who'd spent time in Bordeaux and came back wanting to make wine the same way. So he brought a Bordeaux-trained winemaker with him, he introduced French oak in Spain, built the whole thing on what he'd seen in Medoc. So in a real sense, Rioja's wine tradition has Bordeaux DNA. And now the estate has the Frank Henry Hotel on top of it and all that jazz, but even without it, the more modest wineries are also not bad in Rioja. So both places are absolutely worth visiting, and not only for wine, they're just 400 kilometers apart. It's not so far by European standards and by American standards as well, but they feel completely different. In Rioja you have the extraordinary food, I've eaten in local restaurants there that are genuinely at Michelin level, and they are Michelin restaurants. Some of them have the stars, some don't, so the food culture in the Basque country and in Rioja is one of the best in Europe. In Bordeaux and the area around Bordeaux you've got some of the most celebrated restaurants in France and in Europe as well, so you have multiple Michelin stars, wine lists that are basically investment documents. But also not far from the city you've got the Arcachon Bay, it has some of the best oysters in Europe, a plate of fresh oysters with a glass of some white wine sitting on the Atlantic coast, that is one of those combinations you just remember even if the wine was not the top level probably. And climatically the regions are very different as well. So Bordeaux it is on the Atlantic coast of France, it is split by the Gironde estuary, so you have oceanic climate, it is quite mild, quite humid. The left bank, Médoc, has famous gravel soils that drain very well and hold heat. The right bank you have Saint-Emilion, you have Pomerol here, it is more clay, more limestone, more merlot dominant, it has some round, more plush wines, so these are the two different styles within the same region. And Rioja on the contrary, it is inland, northern Spain, there's a valley protected by mountains on both sides. So you have the Cantabrian range blocks the Atlantic rain from the north and you have on the other side the Sierra de la Demanda, it holds off Mediterranean heat from the south and that kind of balance gives you enough warmth to ripen Tempranillo and enough freshness to keep the acidity alive. Obviously the grape varieties are different, mostly Tempranillo versus Capsol or Merlot in Bordeaux, so here's the short story version of all this mess. So under 30 euros just go for Rioja. Over that, specifically once you're into very serious wines like maybe 50 to 100, probably Bordeaux. But honestly it also comes down to style. If you love the elegance and the old character, the traditional style of Rioja, you might prefer it at any price basically. If you are drawn to Cabernet-based structure and that classic Bordeaux profile, a lot of blending, so nothing replaces it for you, these are just quality-based suggestions, not rules. And if you want to experience either of them properly at the source, we can do both. If you are planning your next trip to Bordeaux or to Spain, I'm ready to help, so all the links are in the description and I'll see you in the next one. Cheers!