Rioja Spanish Wine Region

The following excerpt is taken from Oz Clarke’s Encyclopedia of Wine and describes the Rioja wine-producing region of north-central Spain. Straddling the Ebro river, the Rioja region—taking its name from the Rio Oja, a tributary of the Ebro—has traditionally been responsible for producing red wines using the Tempranillo grape variety, though there are also white wines available.

Rioja Wine

Just because you see a sign by the roadside welcoming you to La Rioja, there’s no reason to believe that you’ve arrived in the Rioja DOC, even if the car window does give you an uninterrupted vista of vines. La Rioja, the autonomous region, has quite different boundaries from Rioja, the Denominación de Origen Califacada. Not all the vines that grow in the autonomous region are entitled to the name Rioja. And the Rioja DOC stretches way out into Navarra, where vines yield priority to asparagus, artichokes and spicy red peppers, all flourishing in the fertile soil, while an important part of the DOC (Rioja Alavesa) lies inside the boundaries of the Basque country (País Vasco) and there are some western patches in Castilla-León.

There is a certain logic to the Rioja DOC region taken as a whole. Named after the Rio or River Oja, a tributary of the River Ebro, the region is centred on the Ebro Valley and, for much of its length, is bounded to the north and south by dramatic chains of mountains, particularly the Sierra de Cantabria. (Take a half-hour drive south of Logroño, the wine capital of the region, through cornfields and vineyards, and you’ll suddenly find yourself amid rough-hewn mountains of spectacular beauty, dotted with half-deserted villages.) But when you get down to the three official sub-regions of Rioja—Rioja Alta, Rioja Alavesa and Rioja Baja—it soon becomes evident that the characteristics of the three regions are less clear-cut than sometimes suggested and many Riojas are a blend of wines from two or more of these regions.

The Rioja Baja (to the south-east and mostly in Navarra), accounts for 39 per cent of the Rioja DOC. Enjoying a Mediterranean climate, it is indeed as hot and dry here as books say, and much of its silt or clay soil on the flat valley floor is too fertile for good-quality grapes. The resulting wines are fatter and more alcoholic—generally from the Garnacha Tinta, which survives better than the Tempranillo in these hot conditions. But the borders between the Rioja Alavesa (which accounts for just 18 per cent of the total Rioja vineyard area) and the Rioja Alta were drawn simply along the edges of the Basque province of Alava.

The most aromatic Tempranillo red wines come from grapes grown on the yellow calcareous clay which occurs all over the Rioja Alavesa and extends well into the Alta region; Tempranillo flourishes here in the limestone, producing grapes with high acidity and a good concentration of flavours. Much more of the Alta soil is very similar to the silt and clay of the Baja and consequently grows Garnacha. But, unlike the Baja, both the Alta and the Alavesa regions have climates in which the hot, Mediterranean weather is moderated by cooler breezes from the Atlantic Ocean.

Source: Oz Clarke’s Encyclopedia of Wine  

Sub-regions of Rioja

Rioja Alta - making big assertive wines which need time to soften.

Rioja Alevesa - soft rich and fruity wines - possibly the best quality

Rioja Baja - the hottest region.

The grapes used in the making of Rioja are mainly the Tempranillo with the addition of some Mazuela, Garnacha Tinto, Graciano and a few more.