Viña Real - age before beauty

Viña Real (pronounced 'vinya ray-al') is a producer I've recently come to appreciate, with my first experience being the 1951 Rioja Gran Reserva that we drank to celebrate my mother-in-law's 60th birthday. On my recent trip to Spain, my husband and I visited a few wineries in Rioja, including this one. A modern structure built to resemble a huge wine vat (large tank) reminiscent of the old wooden vats from traditional winemaking, it's the recent home of a not-so-new label that was previously housed in the C.V.N.E. property in Haro, the winemaking city in the Rioja Alta sub-region. Compania Vinicola del Norte de España, also known as 'Cune,' is the winery where the company began in 1879. Viña Real's separate facility made of wood, concrete, and stainless steel opened in 2004 in the Rioja Alavesa sub-region and exclusively makes that label. In addition to the impressive structure and the feeling that we were inside a huge wine vat, the technology employed in this winery was like nothing I'd seen before. A huge crane works its way around the winery and transports what they call IFOs, identifiable flying objects, which are silver vessels that receive the grapes and then carry them over and into the stainless steel tanks for fermentation, enabling gravity-flow winemaking.

After alcoholic fermentation in the tanks the wine is transferred by gravity through hoses to the barrels on the lower level for aging. Once in barrel the Reserva wines will remain there for 18 months, being racked off the sediment every 6 months. A barrel washer speeds up the racking process, cleaning something like 200 barrels in a day. The most I could clean by hand was 17 in a day and after 2 days of that I was out of commission for a week! The winery has 2 long caves the size of 2 football field each built into the hill for barrel and bottle aging. Made of limestone, they remain cool and humid; they were built by the same outfit that constructed the subway tunnels in Bilbao, Spain. Penicillin mold grows all along the caves and barrels and bottles, and they believe this helps keep bacteria out of the winery and protect the wine from light and temperature variances.

And now, the wine... at the winery we tasted their Crianza 2009, which was very pleasant with flavors of berries and balsamic. We bought a Magnum (double bottle) of the 2005 Gran Reserva (for 38 Euros! cheap!) to age it, since we know from experience that this wine ages tremendously. This may be our silver anniversary wine... but we could probably save it for the golden. Their Gran Reservas, not made every year, spend 7 years in the winery before release. At a restaurant in San Sebastian called Rekondo, known for its wine cellar, we ordered a bottle of Viña Real Rioja Gran Reserva 1966. The wine director uses heated metal to cut these older bottles off at the neck, just under the cork, rather than dealing with cork removal, which can be tricky in older wines. He also refuses to decant the wines, believing that drinking the wine from the bottle it aged in, with its sediment, is part of the experience. He brought us a small glass to try. Jeremy didn't even taste it; he gave it a brief swirl and sniff and then a knowing smile. The wine guy said, "that is all I need, that expression of pure joy on your face." We were so excited to try it.  At 47 years old, the wine was bright, fruity, leathery, spicy. Not at all stewed, oxidized, or tired. Perfect with the huge steak they put in front of us. Balanced, complex, smooth and alive, we couldn't believe how it shined.

After dinner we asked to see the wine cellar. The wine guy, from Argentina, explained that he is not a Sommelier or wine certified in any way. He just became interested in wine and learned everything he could about it, falling into this job by luck. The restaurant has an amazing wine collection, perhaps the best in Europe, and they source all their wines directly from the wineries so they know exactly where they came from and how they were stored. They have wines going back to the early 1920s. They have large format bottles - I don't even know if they have names for bottles so big - and I have no idea how you would pour from one. 

Truly an amazing experience, having seen the modernity of the new Viña Real space and experiencing the preserved age of the wines that preceded that space. I can't wait to see what our Magnum holds in store for us in the years to come.