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.
"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.
We eat a parfait of pig's ear, drizzled with balsamic vinegar from Modena and accompanied by tiny bits of duck liver. Alongside is a ceramic spoon filled with lamb's fingers sitting in a rich sauce tasting of olives. We have ravioli stuffed with veal cheek and suffused in vanilla oil. As the dinner progresses, Mercedes becomes increasingly agitated. "Who would want this?" she whispers.
I haven't the heart to tell her that, indeed, much of the world wants exactly this. Such food is coming to the Rioja whether Mercedes wants it or not. Francis is merely the advance guard.
The next afternoon, we gather to celebrate Mercedes's 31st birthday at López de Aguileta, in Labastida, which is as traditional as Rioja restaurants get. Luis Aguileta and his wife, Esperanza Perez, run an asador, a restaurant built around an oven and decorated like someone's comfortable dining room, in this small town in the Basque part of the Rioja. Ten wooden tables are set on a tiled floor, and the menu is simple—six fish and five meat entrées. Aguileta has cooked in Madrid, Barcelona, and Marbella. He returned to the Rioja in 1992 to open a restaurant in a 19th-century house five minutes from his birthplace. He serves us grilled sausage and Patanegra ham. Then leeks in white vinegar, shrimp croquettes, peppers from Guernica sautéed in hot oil. Mercedes is exultant. "This is Spanish cuisine," she says, resplendent in her black top and a silver necklace. "At Arzak, they give you anchovies in chocolate. I will never eat anchovies in chocolate."
Her two brothers are here, and her parents, and Maria José, and they've brought López de Heredia wines from recent vintages. We eat sea bream grilled with garlic and parsley and a bit of red pepper, and then slices of beef, cooked rare and salted perfectly. "I always say, 'Honey was not meant for the mouth of a donkey,' " Maria José says, repeating a Spanish proverb. In many ways, she's as sophisticated as anyone I know, but her comment rings true. The charm of the López de Heredia wines, like the charm of the Rioja region, lies in a lack of artifice.
Nevertheless, I'm determined to experiment. Toward the end of the meal, I order several of the new-style Riojas from the wine list, since even the most traditional restaurants carry them these days. I want Pedro López de Heredia, the patriarch of the family and the man responsible for the continued philosophy of the winery, to try one. I pour a glass and set it in front of him. He swirls it and sniffs it, looks at it from one angle and then another, moves it to the right side of his plate and then the left. Like a child determined not to eat his vegetables, he does everything but put it to his lips. Finally, he takes a sip, then another. I ask his opinion, but he offers platitudes. I know there are strong opinions running through his head, percolating around a wisdom that has mitigated the difficulties of several dozen vintages, but I can't get at them. He's hiding behind a genial, almost courtly, demeanor.
When we leave the restaurant, Pedro asks me to ride with him. On the way back to the winery, we make an unannounced detour to his vineyards. We drive up one row and down another. Like a guide on a tourist bus, Pedro announces to me which grapes are grown where, and what each patch of soil contributes to the finished wine. It dawns on me that this is his way of saying that a great wine is made in the vineyard, not the winery. Modern winemaking techniques can smooth out rough edges, but only the land can impart true character. What did he think of the wine I'd given him at lunch? I have my answer.
That evening, from a watchtower in the walls of old Laguardia, I look out on the Castilian plain. Before me is Calatrava's Ysios winery, undulating like an ocean wave, its silver panels glinting in the setting sun. It is a remarkable building, breathtaking in its ultramodern splendor. Still, I'm feeling wistful, and not just because of the quiet dusk. Honey wasn't meant for the mouths of donkeys, and an area so genuine isn't made for such frippery as world-famous architecture and television chefs.
Standing there, high above the Spanish landscape, I recall that 1968 Bosconia I'd tasted at The Cemetery, then tasted again during one of my meals here. It had ripe cherry fruit and an enveloping elegance, and it promised another 40 years of life. It was the conceptual opposite of the meals of tiny appetizers that will be all the rage here any day. The armies of the night are coming, I see clearly, with their made-to-order wines and amuse-bouches and vertical appetizers that look like Gehry designs. It is only a matter of time. For now, I have the taste of Bosconia on my tongue. As darkness falls, its finish lingers on.