"Many of these wineries are owned by corporations," Mercedes says. "They have shareholders and bank loans, and they have to keep selling their product. We own our winery, we own our land, and we have loyal customers. We make wines the way we want to, we age them as long as we want to, and we don't care about what anyone else is doing."
"I personally think that what Riscal has done with the wine and the winery is good marketing," Maria José says. "I congratulate them. But should we all do that? No. There's still, in Spain, the search for authenticity. There are people who want those deep, dark wines that taste like Cabernet, but there are also enough people who want wines made in the old style."
She takes a sip of what anyone would consider an authentic wine, a López de Heredia 1942 Viña Bosconia Gran Reserva. The López de Heredia style has always been to strive for elegance and balance, mature traits in life and in wine, though that means sacrificing the immediate kick of ripe, red fruit that so many wineries covet. As a result, López de Heredia wines don't get exalted reviews, but they drink well just about forever.
I wonder about the future of some of the new-style wines, built sleek like sports cars. Will they ultimately become the standard in the Rioja? What will happen to the cuisine here, and to places like Terete, when the flashy restaurants open? Will anyone still want menestra, or a simple lamb chop? I look at Mercedes, with her eyeliner perfectly applied, and then at Maria José, a traditionalist in the denim clothing of a modernist. It occurs to me that these two women constitute my last line of defense.
Although some wineries here own vineyard land and others don't, nearly all of them buy grapes from several of the hundreds of small, independent farmers scattered throughout the region. That's because the Rioja has so many microclimates and other meteorological curiosities that a superb harvest in one place can mean disaster a few miles away. Most major Rioja wineries are owned by conglomerates and must produce millions of bottles annually. Too much is at stake to rely on a few plots of land in a single part of the region. López de Heredia is the exception. The family owns all of its vineyard land, just as it seasons its own wooden barrels, handcrafted from American oak, and still vinifies wine the traditional way, fermenting in huge wooden tanks and fining with egg whites.
The López de Heredia winery was founded in 1877. The structure itself, which looks vaguely Swiss, seems lopsided. An Art Nouveau tower, trimmed in fire-engine red, pokes out from a wing like one of those early examples of skyscrapers you see in architecture textbooks. But the family loves it. The offices, done up in frosted glass and wrought iron, feature swinging saloon doors that seem transported from the Wild West. The cellar is filled with thousands of old bottles slumbering behind cobwebs—the sisters call it The Cemetery. Here, Mercedes and Maria José open three vintages of Gran Reserva: the 1968, 1964, and 1954 of their Viña Tondonia and Viña Bosconia red wines. Some show better than others, but the freshness is uniformly remarkable. Most Bordeaux would be dead and gone at a similar age.
The red Tondonias are bottled in the broad-shouldered bottles of Bordeaux. They age in oak for a year longer than a Bosconia does, and they're not quite as soft and smooth as the Bosconias when they're young. Bosconias, sold in slope-shouldered bottles like those from Burgundy, have a greater concentration of Tempranillo, a grape that has a slightly higher level of alcohol and has always been Rioja's most prominent. They show sweet, dusty fruit in their youth and an ethereal elegance as they age. The '68 Bosconia, in particular, has the refinement and power of a glorious old Gevrey-Chambertin, though it's undeniably a Rioja. All the wines are classic Riojas, in fact, made from classic Rioja grapes like Tempranillo, Garnacha, Mazuelo, and Graciano. Some of the new-wave releases include a surreptitious dollop of Cabernet Sauvignon, the great grape of Bordeaux and Napa. "I like Cabernet," Maria José insists. "There's a place for those wines. It just isn't here."
When I first met Maria José, years ago, she informed me that the wine-drinking world was divided into Tondonians and Bosconians. This seemed absurd, since the majority of the world has no idea that Tondonias and Bosconias even exist. Lately, though, I've come to see what she means. It's a philosophical division. Tondonians are literalists, traditionalists, math majors, Yankees fans. They see the world in clear-eyed fashion, and they gravitate toward the sure thing. That's Mercedes. Bosconians like Maria José are dreamers, aesthetes, Red Sox fans, perhaps even closet revolutionaries. They seek out the undiscovered, the subtle, the mysterious.
"Do you remember that conversation?" I ask Maria José a few hours later, but she can't hear me over the whine of the car engine. She's driving down a narrow road in the purple darkness, going far too fast in a 1968 Mini Cooper about the size of a pedal boat. "Nobody wants to drive with me," she says. I understand why. Maria José reacts to red lights and stop signs the way a fighting bull does to a pink cape.
Our destination is Ezcaray, a village of houses clumped together in the Spanish style, and the restaurant Echaurren. It's immaculate, with velvet curtains and hardwood floors—sort of an updated version of Arzak. Marisa Paniego and her son, Francis, preside over the kitchen-rather, two kitchens. In one, Marisa cooks traditional Rioja food with uncommon flair. In the other, Francis transposes the traditional into a medley of tiny dishes that are so evolved as to be almost unrecognizable. He'll be cooking for us tonight. "One must renovate the tradition and maintain it at the same time," he tells us before the meal.
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