The Rioja region looks like something a fourth-grader would draw. Improbable towns are perched precariously on top of hills that jut from the gentle landscape; around them are fertile flatlands, laid out in Crayola purples and browns. To the north, a series of mountain ranges buttresses the Rioja from the sea. To the south, a mesa seems to stretch all the way to Madrid. This is farming country, and people here eat and drink what they farm. There are no Michelin stars in the Rioja, no celebrity chefs with television shows, yet its unadorned cuisine is among the best in Spain, and its wines have been internationally famous for more than a century. It is the part of Spain where bullfight aficionados pay attention to the bulls, not the matadors who try to tame them with a performer's art, and that same emphasis on raw materials has carried over to its cuisine. Seasonal vegetables, free-range lamb, and fish trucked in from the Bay of Biscay, an hour north, are the star attractions here. The best a chef can do is stay out of the way.
But the Rioja is changing. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum transformed Bilbao from Spain's Pittsburgh into one of Europe's top attractions. The new headquarters he has designed for Marqués de Riscal, in Elciego, looks like a giant titanium butterfly, or perhaps a flamenco dancer in midtwirl. The Rioja has never seen anything like it. The word is that Martin Berasategui, with his three Michelin stars in the Basque Country, will run a restaurant inside it. And Santiago Calatrava, whose Milwaukee Art Museum addition is America's edifice of the moment, has designed a winery for Bodegas Ysios, a new project of the winemaking giant Bodegas & Bebidas. The tourists are coming, as well as restaurants that cater to them, and chefs eager to win stars. So are more of the international-style wines that most Rioja wineries have recently started turning out with Robert Parker's palate, not respect for tradition, in mind. I figured I had better eat the delightfully simple meals of the Rioja and drink its fragrant and elegant wines while I still could.
Not long ago, I joined Maria José López de Heredia and her sister, Mercedes, at Terete, a restaurant in Haro that dates to 1877. Both in their early thirties, these women represent the generational change that is sweeping through the Rioja as the old chefs and winemakers and grapegrowers who came of age in the Franco years cede their businesses to their sons and daughters. The López de Heredias are one of Spain's most traditional wine-producing families, and they have been eating at Terete for generations. Maria José loves this kind of unpretentious restaurant, but she also loves the high-concept gastronomy of the Basque Country and Catalonia.
"I go to Arzak with my family," she says, referencing Spain's most exalted restaurant, one of the few to have earned three Michelin stars. "And they criticize it."
"I don't like Arzak," Mercedes says from across the table. Mercedes is elegant and feminine, almost cartoonlike in her Spanishness. She would have been at home in Hemingway's Spain, discussing the merits of bullfighters like Manolete and sipping a traditional Rioja. She isn't at home at Arzak, a true temple of modern gastronomy.
Mercedes wears hoop earrings and a chartreuse suit and a perfectly painted face, a look straight out of an Almodóvar movie. Maria José dresses in jeans and work boots, like the law student she was for five years in Bilbao. Together with their two brothers, they help run the R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia winery for their father, Pedro. To me, they represent both halves of the Rioja's coming generation.
Maria José is the international face of the winery, traveling to Norway, the Netherlands, Japan. Mercedes, who recently got a degree in winemaking, continues to learn the craft from her father. She monitors sales figures, sources wood for the barrels, does the payroll, looking immaculate all the while. They both supervise the harvest each year, dressed in the blue zip-up overalls trash collectors or astronauts might wear. One brother, Julio César, manages the vineyard land, and another, Rafael, does marketing. It's a true family business, the scale of which you hardly see anymore in the Spanish wine industry.
Our conversation is interrupted by the arrival of a menestra of carrots, artichoke hearts, mushrooms, and green beans that have been coated in a flour and egg batter and fried to just the beginning of crispness. There's some olive oil involved, and perhaps lamb stock in the sauce, but I have no time to inquire. Our waitress, whose great-grandfather founded Terete, drops off the food and is gone without a word. No unnecessary pleasantries. In this part of the world, that's typical, too.
La Rioja is Spain's oldest and most renowned wine region. Until lately, Riojas weren't made to appeal beyond the Spanish border. They've always had more oak than ripe fruit, more balance than power. They have been available around the world, but wherever you were when you pulled the cork on a Marqués de Riscal or a López de Heredia or a Muga, it tasted like Spain. Suddenly, though, highly extracted, fruit-driven wines designed for the American palate are emerging from this region.
These new wines, nearly all of them made by established wineries, are sold for high prices in double-thick bottles. Many are well crafted, but most of them lack the singular personality of a great Rioja. Riscal's Barón de Chirel was the first of them. It was made in the late 1980s as a means of restoring the winery's reputation, which had flagged when quality slipped. Imitations from other wineries now fill the shelves of El Corte Inglés, the national department store. The odd, Latinate names of many of these wines—Gaudium, Aurus—announce their novelty to the Spanish public.
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