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JR's notes:

This piece has never appeared anywhere, and never will (apart from here). In November 1998 Julian Jeffs, the series editor for the range of wine books published by Faber and Faber hinted that he might like to publish a book on Rioja and asked for a sample chapter. This was what I sent him. He replied in slightly shocked tones that it read more like the scenario for a film-script than a chapter in a serious wine book. More than two years were to pass before I got round to submitting a new chapter for his inspection - in January 2001 - and this time... Well, we shall see. But I still like the original, and that's why I reproduce it here.

================================================================= Sample Introductory Chapter for a proposed book on the wines of Rioja by John Radford for the Faber & Faber series.

Introduction - 'That which we call a rose..'

Imagine... It's a thousand years ago, you've been walking for sixteen hours and your feet are killing you. Your whole body aches with hunger and fatigue and, as you stumble, almost automatically now, in the gathering gloom of the night, you take a sip of the bitter, brackish water which is all you have left in the bottom of your gourd. You lean heavily on your staff, wondering if you'll find shelter before darkness falls completely and the wolves come out of the forest, in their own search for sustenance...

...And then you see a light, and hear the distant tolling of a monastery bell. With each faltering step it becomes louder and the light becomes brighter. You catch the faintest sound of monastic voices united in plainsong and, though exhausted, your pace quickens, your heartbeat revives... Can that possibly be the smell of cooking, borne on the chilly night breeze? The track is a little smoother here, with flat stones laid side-by-side to assist the passage of oxcarts and donkeys... And then you see it: the monastery of Santo Domingo de la Calzada with its welcoming light and warming, open door. The monks relieve you of your pitiful burden and seat you at the refectory table, give you bread, soup and wine, a bed and the safety and warmth of the monastery until morning, when your pilgrimage will continue...

...And though the bread be coarse and dry, the soup of pulses and vegetables from the gardens of the monastery and the wine made last autumn from grapes picked locally, trodden in the monastery's stone troughs and stored in wineskins, yet the sounds and senses, tastes and smells and enjoyment of that meal mean more than supper with the King of Navarra. The food is better than the plumpest roast partridge and the wine as fine a vintage as ever graced the royal table... And the bed, a mattress stuffed with straw on a wooden trestle, is softer than a maiden's bosom...

And, when you've reached the end of your pilgrimage, at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, and you want to write to the monks of Santo Domingo to thank them for their hospitality what instructions do you give to the returning pilgrim who will deliver the letter for you? 'To the brothers of the monastery of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, at the point where the Camino de Santiago crosses the Río Oja'...

There are still pilgrims walking the route today, although the former monastery is now a splendidly-restored Parador, and the river Oja still runs through what is now the small town (population 5,000) of Santo Domingo de la Calzada. Millions of pilgrims must have passed this way since the shrine of St James was established at Santiago de Compostela and then, as now, the journey entitles the pilgrim to free food and lodging at every monastery along the way. A thousand years ago, many would have had cause to bless the brothers of Santo Domingo for their modest supper and, perhaps, the monastery's position by the bridge over the river Oja provided La Rioja's first address... And its name, of course. You can imagine returned pilgrims asking for 'the wine from the Río Oja?'

This would certainly explain why a wineland which is heavily dominated by the river Ebro and served by half a dozen main tributaries should take its name from what is little more than a winding stream which joins the river Tirón - itself little more than a brook - before the Tirón becomes a tributary of the Ebro at Haro. However, when the new constitution of Spain came into being after the death of Franco and the country was divided into autonomous communities, the wine, and the region, were sufficiently well known to give their name to the whole of what had been the province of Logroño, independent from Castilla-León to the west and Navarra to the north and east.

Whatever its name, Rioja has done rather well for itself in the second millennium. Spain's best-known wine (apart from Sherry) has been dominant throughout the country's vinous history, one of the basic commodities of trade throughout the country and the Mediterranean from ancient history up to mediæval times. It was boosted as the forces of Castile won back the northern winelands from the Moorish invaders and the conquering kings restored wine to its rightful place in gastronomy. It was bolstered by the sixteenth-century expansion of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and advanced again by the 'método industrial' introduced by the Marqués de Riscal and his fellow-pioneers in the 1850s and 1860s. It was the great survivor of the bleak years of the mid-20th century when almost all other Spanish wine was tarred with the brush of diluted, locally-bottled 'plonk' masquerading pathetically as 'Spanish Burgundy' and 'Spanish Sauternes'. It was the great flagship of Sp ain's fightback as a serious wine-producing country from the 1970s onward and became a 'find' for the aspiring middle classes in the boom-and-bust 1980s. Some of us there are who have known and loved it all our drinking lives. Others have only discovered it since so many new 'boutique' wineries have sprung up to capitalise on the magnificent natural resources presented by the Tempranillo grape, the iron-clay and chalk soils and the heady river-valley climate. Many will discover it tomorrow - perhaps, even, as a result of reading this book...

...And, as the third millennium opens for business, the bodegas are producing a wider range of better wines than at any time in Rioja's history. This is their story.

[Except that it wasn't]

Body Copy: 927 words