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Hugh Johnsons's favourite Rioja
Can you be a wine writer’s wine writer? If so, Hugh Johnson is it. His stylish prose and his highly tuned palate have introduced many people to the pleasures of fine wine. His autobiography, Wine: A Life Uncorked, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £20.
Rioja for me has always represented the acme of silky fragrance; of wine polished to a fine lustre. When I first met it, forty years ago, it was the only Spanish wine – indeed the only wine made outside France – which was elaborately, painstakingly, expensively prepared in the cellar before it was bottled and offered for sale. To a privileged foreigner, treated to Reservas and Gran Reservas, the sweet fruit of Tempranillo was familiar only in its finished, refined form, after years, even decades of life.
Rioja was like sherry, or indeed Champagne: mere fermentation was only the preliminary stage in its making; it was what happened in stage two, in the cellar, that defined its quality and character. For years I never tasted unaged Rioja, or knew the vigour of Tempranillo raw from the vat.
Of all the practitioners of this tradition the bodegas I came to know best was Lopez de Heredia. Its premises by the station at Haro were and are a shrine to this tradition. Its categorical belief that Rioja finds itself in the cellar is not more eccentric than the Champenois putting his wine through a second fermentation..
Nor, in my view, less rewarding. No other cellar in the world still shows a forty-year-old white wine as an example of its craft; an exception, yes, but a strong indication of intent. Down in the candlelit darkness of tunnels lined with thousands of barrels, in an atmosphere of aethereal incense, the racking of ruby wine is the rite that effects the transformation.
Working like this flies in the face of fashion. Most wines are sold today before they are bottled. Some are sold before they are made. But if your skill is in honing unique flavours, and that takes years of patience, would you change?
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