Do you know anything about spanish wines?

Is this a modern american oak wine or more traditional?

2005 Marqués de Murrieta Rioja Reserva

CT notes seem to point to modern but wanted to check here

Modern. New American oak all the way. I don’t find them to be very traditional at all, but they make a decent and tasty wine.

American oak isn’t a modern thing - the old school producers use it too.

Modern. New American oak all the way. I don’t find them to be very traditional at all, but they make a decent and tasty wine.
Modern. New American oak all the way. I don’t find them to be very traditional at all, but they make a decent and tasty wine.

So “modern” is defined by oak?

I guess that is correct. They were the first “modern” winery in Rioja. The bodega was founded sometime around 1852. Along with Marques de Riscal, founded about five or six years later, they pioneered the idea of aging in oak barrels, racking, and bottling on the estate, concepts they’d learned from the winemakers in Bordeaux.

Other wineries, like C.V.N.E., Lopez de Heredia, Alto, came about 20 years later. I guess those would have to be super modern. Like those other modern wineries, the good folks at Murrietta use American oak.

Good vintage, pretty good wine.

Sounds like I was overly reductionistic in my question.

Ive been told to “try the more traditional” spanish producers.

There’s an easy way to differentiate on the palate. New American oak is tasted on the back of the palate, almost at the roof of the mouth. You can really get it when you swallow the wine and then breathe out through your nose. French oak is tasted on the front of the palate.

French Oak = rich homemade vanilla ice cream, buttered toast, cream
American Oak = cheap vanilla ice cream, dill pickle, coconut

I think that’s way over-generalized. For one thing, many American oaked wines (e.g. Lopez, Ridge) are way more subtle and sophisticated in their oaking than many French oaked wines.
Despite the CW, I find that very few oaked wines taste of vanilla. Mocha and cinnamon are much more common.
The “dill pickle” thing seems to me more a product of the barrel toasting than the oak origin. I can name a bunch of wines in French oak with that characteristic.

and that’s an understatement.

RT

I had this about two weeks ago. It’s drinking pretty well right now. It does have a good dose of oak but that’s Rioja for you. This wine had ripe flavors but was very light on its feet nonetheless. Good QPR. I don’t think it will age much longer though.

Berry, if you are looking to try traditional Rioja producers, I urge you to try the Lopez de Heredia wines if you haven’t already. They are easily my favorite wines of this type. Others I really like in the traditional style are La Rioja Alta, CVNE, certain Muga wines. There’s also a producer called Ramirez de la Piscina whose wines are very old school in feel that are maybe slightly less accomplished but I’m interested in trying more of.

For a nice way to see traditional v. modern style by the same producer, try Muga Prado Enea vs. the modern-styled Torre Muga. Other producers do both traditional and modern styled lines - Sierra Cantabria is one, I think Bodegas Palacios is another. I’m sure GregT can name a bunch more.

Thank you

Awsome. Thank you.

Its not an over generalization that American vs French oak gives a different palate impression, front vs back. Yes, some producers use oak better than others, but there is a general flavor profile that different oaks from different regions give to the wine. Some American oak is better than others and same for French oak.

Regarding dill pickle in French wine, many producers in France are using American oak, without divulging to the public, as well as Eastern European/ Russian oak. Look at the amount of American oak being used in Tuscany for another example. How many Chianti producers admit to that? Let not even get into what oak is actually being used in a “French” barrel.

Lastly, stem fermentation can contribute dill and spice flavors, sometimes mistaken for American oak.

OK Berry, we’ll try to be a little less wise-ass.

In fact, American oak IS “traditional” in Rioja. For many years Rioja wines were criticized as being dried out and tired and dead in oak. When someone starts talking about “traditional” Rioja, my ears start to bleed. I suppose by some measures, Murrietta is the most traditional of all.

But it’s more complicated than that. You have many kinds of oak. Is all French oak or all American oak the same? If so, you’d have to argue that all Cabernet Sauvignon is the same, at least as long as it’s grown within the same political borders. So then all American Cab Sauv is identical, whether grown in Florida or Montana, and all French Cab Sauv is the same, whether grown in Bordeaux or Marseilles. Obviously that’s not the case and ditto for oak.

Then you have the way in which the oak was prepared, which is perhaps akin to the winemaking when discussing a wine. And then you have the age of the containers, and the size, which all contribute. So it becomes difficult to make clear, unambiguous comments regarding oak. If you taste the same wine put into different oak, you’ll see what I mean. It’s NOT all that easy to say that this is French and that is American and that is Hungarian and that is Slovenian.

But all that aside, Murrietta has changed their winemaking over the recent years. They’re perhaps more “modern” in that they want to let their wines be enjoyable young as well as old. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking those are mutually exclusive. Muga for example, makes the Torre Muga, which is a really nice wine. But they suggest that you drink it young. Why? Because as it ages, it becomes more like a “traditional” wine and less like a big, fruity, young wine. So if you drink it young, you can either enjoy it or criticize it as being “modern”, and as it ages, you can do the same because it’s increasingly “traditional”.

I would have agreed with this (and still agree on LdH), except on Thanksgiving I popped a bottle of the '06 Monte Bello. I waited three days to see if it turned a corner and then dumped it. Had not noticed this trait in earlier vintages, but the 2006 tasted like someone dropped a shot of Jack Daniels in it.

• 2006 Ridge Monte Bello - USA, California, San Francisco Bay, Santa Cruz Mountains (11/25/2010)
  Opened for about five hours before drinking. Sight is typical of a young cab. I imagine there’s a wine hiding under all this American oak, but I couldn’t find it. Undrinkable. Someone please tell me the oak integrates with time because I have five more bottles and they were not cheap. (60 pts.)

Posted from CellarTracker

Well, depending on what you like. I’m not a huge fan of Torre Muga at any age and I certainly love Prado Enea. And there are plenty of people who enjoy the reverse. Trying both was a good suggestion.

Fair enough but have you had the 95 or 96 lately? They’re at an interesting stage - still plenty of life ahead but you can see where they’re heading. We don’t have old vintages of those, so I’m going to start checking on them every year or so because I think that ultimately, they’ll become much more like what people consider traditional.

I’ve been enjoying a 2015 Ramirez de la Piscina ‘Reserva’ [Rioja] the last couple of days, and this is excellent. It’s a producer that is new to me and I would concur that it tastes traditional/old school. Their website states that it gets all the vineyard treatment + elevage one would expect: hand harvesting, some destemming, estate grapes, a blend of new and old oak, horizontal storage (?), and so on. Apparently Jorge Ordonez introduced this (sort of) new producer to the US market (they’ve only been around since 1990 I think) and its different than his usual jacked out wines (Numanthia etc.) which surprised me. This reserva is medium bodied, more purple than ruby on the edges, with a nose of sandalwood, orange peel, and anise. On the palate I get cherry liqueur, Luxardo syrup and a touch of anchovy (!). The finish is long - 40 seconds. After having a glass, I went online trying to order more, only to find out my vendor was sold out…I don’t normally respond that fast to a good glass! I could see these aging well for a couple of decades, as it kept improving in glass over days.

If you can find a bottle, this is a producer to check out if you like this style. They remind me of Pecina, beyond the name similarity. I’d give this an A-

When I think of traditional wines from the Rioja, I think of a wine aged for a long time in American oak, a small proportion new.

In the '90s (pardon me if my decades are wrong) winemakers thought, let’s try a higher proportion of new oak, esp French, but a shorter time in barrel. This could be thought of as the modern paradigm. Of course, winemakers like to play around with different proportions of this or that just so we knowitalls cannot generalize with any success.

Re the dill factor, that’s from green American oak. At Ridge Paul was always searching for well seasoned American oak. One Midwestern cooperage was able to provide it for him until the demand for their whisky went though the roof and the owners made the cooperage use ‘Paul’s’ oak for their distilled spirit. Now there are several cooperages with properly seasoned American oak.

I’m drinking the '15 Vina Alberdi Riserva (La Rioja Alta), which is great exemplar of new American oak without the dill. It takes a while for the tempranillo to peek out from behind the oak, frankly, but a half hour after opening it, the sour cherry and acid of the grape are emerging. Looking forward to it with pasta and chanterelles.