Single vineyard Rioja enters the spotlight

Single vineyard Rioja is coming into the international spotlight, helped in the past few years by perfect or near-perfect Parker scores. Rioja Alavesa-based Artadi and Alta-based Finca Allende are at the cutting edge of the single vineyard movement with El Pison and Calvario, Simon Field MW of Berry Bros & Rudd told the drinks business. “The single vineyard movement is a very positive thing for Rioja, but it requires experimentation and the volumes are so tiny that a lot of them stay within the domestic market,” he said.

Working on a new single vineyard project in Rioja Baja is Spanish wine pioneer Alvaro Palacios, who is back at his family’s 100-hectare estate in the town of Alfaro. Believing Baja boasts the perfect terroir for old vine Garnacha, he has steadily increased the percentage of Garnacha in his blends each year, with the ultimate goal of making a single vineyard Garnacha from his 3-hectare Valmira vineyard, which he aims to release in the next few years.

Since returning to Rioja, Palacios has noticed positive a shift towards regional thinking. “People are starting to realise that the three sub regions have very different personalities, like the Left Bank and Right Bank in Bordeaux,” he said. He sees the single vineyard trend as not only exciting, but crucial for Rioja’s future. “We need to take more of a regional approach in Rioja and start putting both the sub regions and the names of the individual villages on our labels like they do in France ­– it’s the only language of fine wine, but the Consejo won’t allow it."

Another spearhead of the single vineyard movement is David Sampedro, who makes a super-premium red and white from his limestone-rich, 1.3-hectare El Brozal plot dating back to Roman times in the town of El Villar, producing a mere 1,000 six-bottle cases a year, the majority of which is exported to the US. Like Palacios, he wants to see winemakers putting village names on their labels. “I’ve had problems with the Consejo for putting the single vineyard name on my labels, but Rioja desperately needs to communicate this terroir concept,” he urged.

Sampedro hope to see more single vineyard Riojas emerge in the near future. “It would lead to a better consumer understanding of Rioja’s terroir concept, but as a winemaker you need to be able to make money in other ways to stay afloat,” he admitted. El Pison, which Sampedro considers to be Spain’s top wine, is made from grapes grown in a high altitude, southeast facing, amphitheatre-shaped, 2.5-hectare old vine clos a mile from Laguardia in Rioja Alavesa. The brainchild of Juan Carlos Lopez de Lacaille of Artadi, the 2004 vintage received 100 points from The Wine Advocate, and sells for £300 a bottle.

Roda

Wine and the City tries two sensational wines at Roda in Rioja – Roda I Reserva 2006 and the near-mythical Cirsion 2007, made from 100% old vine Tempranillo, with Lottie West from Wines From Rioja. Roda also makes a pair of delicious extra virgin olive oils and recently released two wines from Ribera del Duero under the Corimbo label.

Hotel Viura video

Wine and the City takes you on a tour of one of the six suites in Hotel Viura, Rioja's first luxury boutique hotel in Villabuena de Alava.

Hotel Viura

When Frank Gehry created his purple and silver stainless steel structure for Marqués de Riscal in 2006 (said to resemble the folds in a flamenco skirt), Rioja became a byword for avant-garde architecture. From the glass-fronted, Bond-like Bodegas Baigorri designed by Basque architect Iñaki Aspiazu, to Santiago Calatrava’s undulating Bodegas Ysios, via Zaha Hadid’s futuristic triangular pavilion at López de Heredia, some of the world’s greatest architects have proved their mettle in the region.

The latest addition to Rioja’s ultramodern architectural portfolio is Hotel Viura, a 4 star luxury boutique hotel designed by Joseba and Xabier Aramburu that opened at the end of April. Set next to a 17^th century church against a backdrop of the Sierra de Cantabria mountains in the tiny medieval village of Villabuena de Alava – inhabitants 300, in Rioja Alavesa, the hotel seems to surge out of the ground, its cubed rooms nonchalantly piled on top of each other like building blocks.

Named after Rioja’s most widely planted white grape, Viura is supposed to resemble a bunch of grapes, but to me its whimsically superimposed white cubes are very favela chic. I was invited out on the inaugural press visit last week with a small group of journalists. On arrival I’m offered the house cocktail, made with red wine syrup, amaretto, vodka and soda. It’s sickly sweet and strangely satisfying.

We sip our cocktails whilst waiting for Godoy, Viura’s ebullient, young, Malaga-born sommelier fresh from a stint at the chic boutique Hillbark Hotel in Liverpool. Godoy has already put his stamp on Viura with a reversible wine list, ordered by both region and grape variety.

Before dinner we’re given a tour of the rooftop lounge bar with an outdoor cinema and impressive 360-degree views of Villabuena de Alava. It’s dusk, and the swifts are busy making figures of eight in the sky. From the rooftop we move down to the cellar, decked out with orange neon strip lights, like a Dan Flavin installation. It boasts over 200 bins, 80% of the which are from Rioja, including a sizeable offering of barrel-fermented Viuras and a number of old vintages of CVNE, Marqués de Riscal, López de Heredia, Muga and Roda.

The restaurant serves traditional Basque cuisine with a modern twist. Gold barrels hover from the ceiling in suspended animation. ‘It took a week to paint them and stick them up there’, Godoy informs me, making me fearful I might be floored by one during the starters. On my visit I try cod croquettes, crab ravioli, green pea and black truffle, cream cheese foam with red pepper and chives, suckling lamb, poached pears…

After an epic dinner (I lose count after the sixth course), I’m as stuffed as a pillow and craving sleep. My spacious suite has minimal interiors, dominated by a behemoth bed measuring two square metres – I could turn in it like a compass needle and still be nowhere near the edge.

In keeping with the wine theme, above the bed is a print of a pair of barrels. I lucked out here – one of the journalists got a terrifying, Francis Bacon-esque hadean vision of a cellar. Between the bath and the bed is a sheet of violet glass, which, when peered through from the bath, gives the room a lilac hue. Everything screams cool, from the 42-inch flatscreen TV and red Nespresso, to the black bath products. The curtains are a sober shade of gray, and frame my view out onto Villabuena de Alava via my ridiculously large roof terrace.

Does Viura jar with the village? It sticks out like a fat man on a catwalk, but its higgledy-piggledy high jinks somehow works beside the solid sandstone church. It looks absolutely mad, like an office block has fallen from the sky and landed awkwardly, but that’s the point – it’s supposed to look mad, supposed to provoke a reaction. After all, it’s a work of art as much as a hotel.

Hotel Viura, Calle Mayor, Villabuena de Alava 01307, Spain

Tel: +34 945 60 90 00, www.hotelviura.com

Doubles from €125, daily flights from Heathrow to Bilbao with Vueling