NB.: Any prices, vintage ratings and drinkability expressed are those current at the time this article was published, and may have changed in the meantime. This article is Copyright ©

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JR's notes:

This was an addendum to the round-up of great vintages of Rioja (see THE RIOJAN RÔLE YEARS - July, 1998) in which the theory and practice of making a great gran reserva in a great year are examined. It appeared in WINE in Jul7, 1998. The WINE magazine website is at www.wilmington.co.uk

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GRAN RESERVA

I like to think of red wine as being rather like a bundle of sticks. One of the sticks is tannin, another is fruit, another sugar, others acid, alcohol and so on. Some may be thicker than others but the important thing is that, to form a perfect structure, they should all be the same length. In this way the skilled winemaker can put together a bundle of ingredients which will not only age gracefully but age in harmony - with all the 'sticks' coming to an end at the same time: just the right amount of fruit and acid left to balance the remaining tannins and glycerol, to give the wine its splendid maturity, a gentle retirement and fondly-remembered obsequies. This is what Gran Reserva Rioja is - or should be - all about.

Before we consider that, let's just remind ourselves about the process of turning a Rioja wine into a Gran Reserva. In the first place, the grapes have to be rigorously selected for health, ripeness and cleanliness before going into the fermentation vessel, and a certain proportion discarded: in practice, good winemakers know which parcels of vineyard consistently produce the best grapes and ferment these separately from the main harvest. The first-run juice - as with all quality red wines these days - is run off entirely without pressing and fermented on its own. The remaining pulp is then gently pressed to extract a press wine which will be higher in tannins and extract than the free-run must. The second-pressing wine is no longer used for Rioja, being sold on to the Vino de Mesa market or for distillation. The final cuvée will be assembled from a suitable mixture of free-run wine (which will be full of fruit, primary flavours and higher alcohols but low in ta nnin and extract) and a smaller proportion of first-pressing must which will balance up the needs of the wine for its long sojourn in the cask. This is where the winemaker puts together his 'bundle of sticks'. Too much fruit and the wine will flounder in its own flabbiness before it reaches maturity; too much tannin and it will dry out and scorch the palate; too much extract and it may never even achieve that maturity; and too much acid will thin it into vinegar. This is, perhaps, the most skilled job of any in the bodega - the ability to taste individual tank-samples of wine and to predict how they will develop, when blended in what proportions, over many years. It's a bit like a game of three-dimensional chess: the number of options is almost infinite, and the selection of the cuvée is the first dimension.

The next set of decisions concerns the oak in which the wine will spend its (at least) legal minimum of two years. Large-pore (e.g. American - big effect on the wine) or small-pore (e.g. Limousin or Alliers - less effect on the wine)?; new oak (quick blast of vanillin and oaky 'notes') or old (much slower, more gentle, sometimes very little effect)? This is the second dimension of our three-dimensional chess-game.

The third dimension is that great imponderable - how long? The legal minimum is two years in oak and three years in bottle, but each cuvée differs in its make-up and is likely to have different needs which need to be fulfilled if it is to reach its potential. In an ideal situation, every cask would be tasted every month, and the wine bottled when the time is just right, but Rioja is not a cottage industry and even the largest and richest houses have to rely on batch-sampling to a certain extent. When the time finally comes to bottle, the older houses fine with egg-whites and the unlabelled and uncapsuled bottles are returned to the cellar for their minimum of three years - and often much longer - after which everyone will find out whether the winemaker and the cellarman were right, after all.

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