I posted a similar collection of Rioja photos this time last year, if you need more red & gold in your life

Not your "usual" bunch of Tempranillo grapes

Let’s get one thing straight from the start, it has nothing to do with White Zinfandel. That is a white wine made from red grapes and often in a fruity style.

Tempranillo Blanco, or White Tempranillo, is a relatively ‘new’ grape. It is the result of a natural mutation of the more common ‘red’ Tempranillo, and was discovered on a vine in a vineyard in Murillo de Rio Leza in 1988 by the owner, Jesús Galilea Esteban. DNA analysis proved that this really was tempranillo, but that a natural ‘albinism’ had affected the genes relating to the skin colour that resulted in a yellow/green skin pigmentation instead of the usual blue/purple.

You can read a few more details on the Wikipedia page, ungenerously listed under the title “Tempranillo White Mutant”

Rioja only allows a small number of “official” grapes to be used for its wines, but as this grape was effectively “born” in Rioja, they could hardly not allow it. However, it took a few years of testing by the official Rioja regulatory bodies first. They took the cutting, grew the plant, used this to take more cuttings and so on, until they had a small number of vines from which to produce grapes and test the resulting wine.

The initial results were positive, so a limited number of producers, including Bodegas Dinastia Vivanco, were allowed limit plantings of the vines as “experimental” varieties. This too was successful and finally, in 2007, Tempranillo Blanco was approved as a minority variety in white wine blends.

Of course wineries need to grow the grapes first before they can make the wines, and it takes around 3 years to mature a young vine enough to produce good grapes. However, the pioneers of this production have now started to see the benefit of the early investment and so in 2010 and 2011 some Tempranillo Blanco will start to appear in bottles of Rioja white wines, although it is still planted in tiny quantities exclusively in Rioja.

According to Dinastia Vivanco:

Tempranillo Blanco wines offer intense fruity aromas, with banana, green apple, citrus and floral characters.

Whilst Tom Perry, of Inside Rioja, tasted one of the very first versions of this wine which I think was aged in acacia wood barrels for a period and reported:

The wine was surprisingly tasty:  straw yellow color, a nose that combined citrus, butter and dried apricots which reminded me a little of viognier if it weren’t for the citrus.  It had a medium mouthfeel, and tasted  citrusy with apricots along with a little black licorice.

I look forward to seeing what producers do with it and to tasting as many as I can.

Just read a fascinating post by my friend Tom Perry on his Inside Rioja blog.

He shares some news coming from Bodegas Lopez de Heredia and some historical research they are doing on Rioja and their winery.

Just one of the fascinating facts concerns why the Spanish call their Red wine, “Tinto” (as opposed to Rojo).

Did you ever wonder why red wine in Spanish is called tinto (tinted) instead of rouge (red) as in French or negre (black) as in Catalán? According to María José, most red wines in Rioja in the 19th century were whites that were ‘tinted’ with red wine to pay lower taxes! While some reds were produced and exported to Bordeaux, according to historical records, most Rioja was white and shipped to Alsace.

This is not the first time I discover that something I “knew” about the history of Rioja was wrong. This is a very interesting story that demands more research. Keep an eye on Tom’s site, and I’ll do the same.

In the interim, anyone want to get “tinted”?

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• Wines of The Times: Rioja Crianza, a Satisfying Choice in Both Taste and Value (nytimes.com)
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Then, something comes along to show how silly that is.

You’ve probably seem me mention twitter before (you can follow me @thirstforrioja), a means of keeping in touch with people and exchanging information using only 140 character messages. I’ve even used it for wine tastings. Now, there is a video equivalent. This is not a YouTube channel where you can post 10 minute videos. You only get 12 seconds to record your message. No more, no less.

Does it work for wine? Well, check out this reaction to Coleccion Vivanco Rioja 4 Varietales 2005. Do you think it expresses passion and honesty? Would you buy the wine?

Sooo good. #ttl on 12seconds.tv

Love it!

As a wine blogger and social media activist, I feel it is important to spread the word about wine, wine culture and the great stuff that wineries are doing online. Of course, one of these wineries happens to be Dinastia Vivanco.

So as well as helping out my friends, I also had a couple of wines to show, and I’m very glad to say that both the Vivanco Viura Malvasia (white) and Crianza 2004 (red) were extremely popular with the London Bloggers.

I really enjoy tasting these wines with people. Firstly the white is not what they expect – much more tropical fruit and richness and also no oak age. It is a revelation for most wine consumers, even if they are reasonably knowledgeable and gives me great pleasure to introduce it, particularly if they too are the type of person looking for something really new in wine. The Crianza is “just what the doctor ordered” (note: I am not making any health claims for these wines, that’s not allowed!) and a spectacular example of Rioja with a modern twist – a greater depth of rich fruit and 100% tempranillo.

Ember was a great venue for this sort of gathering. They were very welcoming and organised, plus we had some nice staff on hand and the room to ourselves most of the night. By some cosmic coincidence, and the fact that I have met the Chief Executive, they sell the two Dinastia Vivanco wines we tasted, so it was a place well prepared for tasting good wines.

I’m very grateful for the chance to taste these wines with a great bunch of people with many different backgrounds, and many different views on wine. I look forward to hearing what they made of these wines on the night and to introduce them to the bigger Dinastia Vivanco project as well. I will post up a round up of views and reviews as I come across them, but please feel free to drop me a note so I can talk to you about your views.

For those who are interested in more information and some stockists on these wines, check out the information on Dinastia Vivanco on this site.

Recently, the Rioja marketing body started a (viral) campaign to find the “sound of Rioja” by getting (predominantly young) people to send in video clips of them making sounds with their Rioja by running their finger on the edge of a crystal glass – full of Rioja of course! The results would be combined into a video for promoting Rioja, a laudable aim.

“Yeah, right!” thought I. “You’ll not get a lot of participation, and what you’ll get will be low quality.”

Now I see that this video has been launched (worth a watch/listen) that says “Producida a partir de imagenes de los usuarios de www.riojapasion.com” (Made from images provided by users of www.riojapasion.com):

Pretty cool and a bit fun.

However, my scepticism has not completely gone away. If you visit their site at Rioja Pasion, you will get to see this video and all its wonderful production values, then you click through to the main site and see the list of some of the 57,000 video they (apparently) received. Visitors get to vote on their favourites, and you can see the top 10 on this page. Somehow these 10 don’t quite match the main video!?

This is a big fallacy in the “user generated content” type viral campaign. Even if people like the idea and get behind the campaign (as they have done here), the results are rarely as wonderful as the planners’ mental pictures at the start.

Am I being too harsh?

However, enjoy the Sound of Rioja, or failing that, make our own by popping a cork and drinking it.

Click here to see LARGE on a black background

Mainly because I have not got around to posting about my visits to wineries yet, but want to prove I’m still around. Isn’t it beautiful though?

Last week saw some light rain on Tuesday, not enough to stop some from picking, but cold and damp weather is definitely on its way. However, Wednesday cleared a little and Thursday was glorious! However, Thursday’s sun and clear blue skies revelead that there had been considerable snowfall in the mountain ranges just to the South of the vineyard areas.

The weekend remained good, and a great deal of effort was put into bringing in what they could, if the number of tractors and pickers in the fields are anything to judge by.

This week the weather is meant to turn again and they are currently predicting rain for the rest of the week, a depressing prospect for those with grapes on the vines. However, what is coming in looked healthy and certainly those I have spoken to have been happy with their harvests this year.

Let’s hope it stays that way!

More on tastings and visits to wineries soon.

However, I took Ryan Opaz from Catavino to visit the Dinastia Vivanco vineyards and winery during the 2008 vintage activity, and I HAVE TO share this photo (one of many he took) as it is just beautiful! In fact, it might (if I beg hard enough) appear on my next Moo cards!

Enjoy!

Click on the image itself for a treat, see it on a black background for the full effect, or click here to see Ryan’s other Rioja photos.

Photo: Fall Vines by Ryan Opaz, used on licence through creative commons

The first one would be our all too brief visit to the most welcoming and personable Mr Miguel Merino‘s cellar in the picturesque village of Briones. This is the same town that also is home to Dinastia Vivanco‘s winery, and despite being so tiny, it has several top producers (Dinastia Vivanco, Miguel Merino, Finca Allende) because of its highly regarded local microclimate, especially for the production of Tempranillo.

Our visit to Miguel’s eponymous winery was on the third day of the conference, and therefore a Sunday. Despite this, Miguel was very welcoming when around 30 of us descended on his small winery on the little road leading into town. The schedule gave us around an hour and a half, which isn’t long when you have a fascinating story to listen to.

If you have not yet had any of his wines, I must say I recommend that you seek them out. Production here is not very large. I didn’t get a figure for the number of bottles, but this is ‘artisan’ winemaking, with small tanks (which he has to heat or cool personally by hosing down home-made blankets that cover the tanks), a all-hands-on-deck approach and a true commitment to quality. Miguel himself is relatively new to winemaking having had a career selling it for many years, but the urge to make wine finally took hold and I’m very glad it did.

We had a brief tour of the winery, and listened to his philosophy of Heaven, Hell & Purgatory (his categorisation for the grapes that are hand sorted as they come in to the winery – I leave this to your imagination, but you can read another participants’ account here), but he spent much more time in the barrel cellar and the tasting, after all the wine itself is proof enough of the quality of his operation.

We tasted three wines together and I’ve included my notes below. If you are planning to be in the area, please do get in touch with him and book a visit (this is a small, family winery so they need to know you are coming). If you can’t, do try and find these wines wherever you are. They are not cheap, but the best hand made wines never will be, and these are the kind of wines that keep Rioja at the very top of the list of top wine regions in the world.

More Rioja winery experience coming very soon!

[tasted 31 August 2008]