Rioja Single Vinyards

There will be officially singe vineyards in Rioja:

Question: any online maps available?

I know only this one Weinlagen
ansd it needs some more input.

Charlie

Charlie - it’s kind of a new thing so I doubt that you’ll find much at this point. Eventually I suppose they’ll be all over. It’s been in the works for a long time but I have mixed feelings about it.

Have the holdouts from the Rioja naming system said they will return if this is rolled out?

Some have because it’s what they wanted. Others won’t because it’s not yet Burgundy and they can’t yet charge Burgundy prices. I think it was a lot of wasted effort.

The whole point of single vineyard wines is creating a brand, it’s just doing the brand in a different way than you might by having a house style. Instead you create a story - talk about the clay/granite/limestone/sand/stones or whatever it is you have and claim that is why your wine is incredibly special. The smaller producers wanted to challenge the big guys and one thing they had was their single vineyards. So did the big guys of course, but they had more of them. Thus, it only mattered most to the people who only had one or a few vineyard sources.

They also made some other changes that are kind of interesting in that they argue against the general movement. Normally when there are places where specific vineyards matter because they’re supposed to show terroir, the types of grapes you can use is also limited because then you can claim things about terroir that aren’t necessarily true. But in Rioja they’ve recently expanded the number of grapes that can be used, which is kind of interesting, and there’s also more monovarietal bottling. I agree with both of those moves, although I doubt that the world needs more oaky Chardonnay.

To me the best move would have been to make it entirely voluntary. The manifesto guys wanted to recreate something like they have in France, with village wines, etc., and an assumption that the single vineyard wines are better than the village wines. I think that’s archaic and dumb. Better would have been to come up with a trademark, which could be the DOC name, that people could use if they met certain requirements, but leave everything else alone and let the market decide.

But if they announce single vineyards, they must have some idea where they are

They most definitely do. But “they” are a diverse group and it’s not like there’s a group of vineyards that was designated overnight. Now that they’re officially able to designate vineyards, (which they always were), each producer who’s interested needs to decide which vineyard or vineyards to designate.

I wonder how the more traditional houses will approach this . LdH, you can argue, already have vineyard bottling in Tondonia and Bosconia, but as I understand it, they are massive vineyards. They also seem to have an approach to a ,“house stlyle”, more Bordeaux like than a vineyard/ vintage focus of burgundy.