Evolution is the heart of all great wine: fine winemakers obsessively consider the progression of their wines from vintage to vintage, from decade to decade, how they change in tune with the public’s perception of how a wine should taste. But fine wine is also about consistency: however much the wine evolves it must be recognisably of its terroir. The only proprietor I have ever met who has so comprehensively made concrete this tension between change and consistency is Vicente Dalmau Cebrian-Sagarriga.
‘You see that building over there?’ The energetic owner of
Marques de Murrieta points to a substantial, low dwelling 50 yards away. ‘In
two weeks I’m going to pull that down.’ Indeed, he’s knocked down the entire
estate and rebuilt it – almost exactly as it was before.
It is an extraordinary undertaking. The Castillo Ygay, the 160-year-old
centrepiece, looks from the outside exactly as it did before. But since 2007
the castle - the main massing of the original stone – and its attendant buildings
have been razed to the ground and rebuilt. The only part of the original estate
that has survived is the 1852 bottle cellar. There are new tasting rooms, a
museum, a dining room with a kitchen ‘identical to the one at El Bulli’, Cebrian
says, namechecking the now-defunct Best Restaurant in the World, new cellars, a
70,000-bottle library of Murrieta vintages going back to 1852, and a shop with
Enomatic machines for tasting.
And that is just the start. The next phase, starting in
2013, will be the rebuilding of the winemaking facilities, with new tanks and
new equipment. The quantity of wine produced, delimited by the size of the
estate, will not increase. The entire project, both castle and winery, will
come in at some €20m.
It’s the kind of audacious and extravagant undertaking you’d
expect to find in California. Sandstone blocks, each the size of a small car,
are trucked in and hand-hewn by a team of Galician stonemasons who have been
working on site for years. When cut to size, the stones are distressed by a
mason with a cold-chisel – in order for
them to look old. In the vast square-footage of the castle, and the
hundreds of metres of pathway surrounding it, every pockmark on every stone has
been chipped out by hand. I doubt Charles Foster Kane, dreaming of his Xanadu,
would have gone that far. Cebrian says the stone accounted for some 20% of the
cost of the project.
Why such an extraordinary undertaking? The old castillo desperately needed renovation –
the foundations, they discovered, were less than a foot deep – but they wanted
to preserve ‘with faithful accuracy its original shape, identity and
architectural centennial beauty,’ as I’m told during one of our many email
exchanges. Castillo Ygay was simply too much of an icon to change in even the
smallest degree.
So it is new, but it is old. As such it’s the perfect
metaphor for what Cebrian and his technical director Maria Vargas are trying to
do at Murrieta. Indeed, it’s a handy metaphor for the process of change that is
going on in the whole of Rioja, with bodegas teetering on that fine line
between modernity and tradition.
Discussing the project, from the bricks-and-mortar
rebuilding to the development of the wines, Cebrian’s conversation is littered
with the language of evolution and preservation; the oxymoronic words ‘change’
and ‘maintain’ are used over and over again. ‘You can’t stop,’ he says. ‘You
need always to be in evolution.’ And on the other hand, ‘Over 12 years I have
been slowly defining the style of Murrieta while always trying to maintain the
identity. It’s like the winery: we are balancing tradition and identity, youth
and modernity.’
The Ygay estate, which Luciano, Marques de Murrieta founded
in the mid-19th century (1852 was the date of the first official
shipping of the wines), is the biggest single estate in Rioja. Its 300ha are
wholly-owned – unusually for the region, where it is far more common for even
the oldest estates to own few hectares but to buy in grapes from dozens of
growers. The vineyards, composed of old alluvial soils, clay and limestone,
with a warm surface of hefty river stones, give excellent drainage and are
meticulously husbanded.
‘Everything starts in the vineyard,’ Cebrian says. Vine
stress is controlled by ultra-modern infrared leaf imaging techniques by which
water conductivity in the leaf is measured and vines irrigated accordingly.
Parcels are separately vinified, and the team – led by Vargas – are constantly
adjusting maceration times and the oak regime in search of the perfect balance
of colour and fruit.
The flagship wine, the Gran Reserva Castillo Ygay – a
Tempranillo/Mazuelo blend which Greg Sherwood MW of importer Handford Wines
calls ‘One of the three most famous labels anywhere in the world’ – is
undergoing a transformation as radical, and perhaps as invisible, as the castle
itself.
‘We don’t want to lose the identity American oak gives the
wine,’ Cebrian says, ‘but we want to offer
more fruit and a better balance between oak and fruit.’
From the 2000 vintage the oak regime (on both Ygay and
Marques de Murrieta, the entry-level offering) has been overhauled. Whereas
Ygay used to spend 50-60 months in 5-7-year-old barrels, Cebrian and Vargas
have shortened and intensified the process. Now it spends 30 months in oak, the
first year of which is new. ‘This is the first time Ygay has touched new oak at
the beginning of its life.’
Fermentation and maceration is now far more controlled,
Cebrian says, at lower temperatures, ‘for less extraction but more fruit’.
The aim, he says, is to turn back the clock: to return
Murrieta to the glory days. ‘What we’re trying to achieve is to move into the
era of Marques de Murrieta wines of 40 years ago – wines of elegance,
femininity and power, with nice balance and a lot of colour.’
There are of course two Ygays: one that is bottled after 30
months and aged for three years in bottle; and the historic vintages, which are
left in barrel for decades. The 1978 is in the market now (it sells for less
than £100 a bottle, amazingly), and the next release will be the 1980, followed
possibly by the 1982 and the 87.
‘We want to show the market how Ygay can age in oak and bottle,’ Cebrian says.
In the €15 Marques de Murrieta, there is also this
adjustment, a throttling back of extraction here, a slight lowering of the
fermentation temperature there.
‘In 2008 we are turning into something more delicate and
feminine. It’s exactly the same basis but we’re moving into something more
exclusive. Between 2007 and 2008 you can see another touch’ – but as always he
stresses the delicacy of the adjustment – ‘there is no parabola.’
Vicente Dalmau Cebrian-Sagarriga y Suarez-Llanos, Conde de
Creixell, inherited one of the most venerable bodegas in Spain in 1996 at the
age of 24, on the sudden death of his father, who was only 47. There was, he
said, ‘a great emptiness’ in those months. He clarifies: ‘An emptiness in the
sense of image. Who was the boss? What was going to happen to the winery?’
So he went to Ygay and ‘spent three years just looking. What
was the new project? I knew I had to maintain the identity of the estate but at
the same time add youth and modernity.’
It’s a powerful picture. A young man, a playboy (as he says
he still is – ‘girlfriends, girlfriends, girlfriends’), literally at the centre
of the great estate, trying to make sense of his sudden inheritance, keen to
make a mark yet sensible of the weight of history and the responsibility that
has landed on his shoulders.
I also get an idea that the Cebrian family – outsiders from
Galicia (where the stonemasons come from) – took a while to adjust to Rioja.
Cebrian’s father had bought the noble but run-down bodega in 1983 on the
proceeds of the sale of TV company Antena 3, ‘but the Riojanas wouldn’t accept
him. He was resented.’
The young heir had even more of a reason to stamp his
authority on Murrieta: he was doing it for his father as well.
The result of his three-year contemplation of the estate was
the hiring of ‘a new, young team’, with Vargas being appointed winemaker in
2000. ‘This was a new project inside the old. We began a different dialogue
with the estate.’
As far as the wines were concerned, there was indeed a ‘new
project within the old’. Cebrian’s father had died just as the drive to
‘modernity’ was kicking off. In Bordeaux this meant the Vins de Garage of the
right bank; in Rioja a similar style – micro-cuvée, nano-yield, high
extraction, fruit-layered wines – became known by the wonderfully pretentious
moniker of Vinos de Autor.
‘I hate that – the concentration, the high-fruit nose, the
high alcohol. But one of the first projects that Maria and I did was to make
another red wine next to this new concept of Rioja. It would represent a very
small percentage of our output, only 20,000 bottles, but it would be a chance
for Marques de Murrieta to show this is what we feel is a modern wine.’
It would, Cebrian said, ‘send a message to the market that
the son had taken over.’ Dalmau, Murrieta’s very own ‘Vino de Autor’, led the charge. This is how Cebrian would ‘show
the market how Marques de Murrieta understands the new era of winemaking in
Rioja.’
He and Vargas were consciously breaking free of history.
‘With this wine we had no roots. We thought, “Let’s do something different”.’
They added Cabernet Sauvignon (the estate’s tiny Cabernet
crop now goes entirely into Dalmau) to the 90%-plus Tempranillo, put it through
malolactic fermentation in barrel (‘for a creamier feel’), and aged it for 20
months in 225-litre new French oak barrels.
The Tempranillo comes from the prized Canajas plot, 500m
above sea level, where the vines are 50 years old – and they ramp up the
concentration by green-harvesting an average of 50% of the fruit.
The resulting €80 wine is a dark, almost inky glassful,
redolent of pencil shavings, eucalyptus, dark black cherry and blackberry, with
tremendous potency, silky tannins and wonderful length. It is a delicious wine,
made by a winemaker at the top of her game, with the best raw material and the
most expensive technology available.
But, to paraphrase the French general, ‘C’est magnifique,
mais ce n’est pas Rioja.’ In Cebrian’s own phrase, it is a ‘concept wine’, and
for all its sleekness it is about as Spanish as the glass elevators that swoosh
up and down the outside of the Reina Sofia art gallery in Madrid.
I don’t share these thoughts during the tasting as we have
already discussed modernity and internationalism in some detail. While we were
looking at the Marques de Murrieta I had suggested the 2008 had a more
‘international’ feel than its predecessors. What did I mean, Cebrian asked. It
was more to do with the quality of the tannins and the liftedness of the
palate, I thought, but it was subtle. What I called international could be
described as feminine – that is, more in tune with a worldwide movement towards
lighter and more delicate wines. He was mollified. ‘I thought for a moment you
were saying we had lost our Rioja character.’
Not a bit of it – the Marques de Murrieta is a wonderful,
terroir-driven wine. But I simply can’t say the same for Dalmau, which I think
is one of those toned, somewhat airbrushed beauties one finds from high-end
wineries all over the world: wines designed to wow a tableful of Korean
businessmen as effortlessly as a dinner party in Oslo.
There are many who disagree. Greg Sherwood reckons ‘they
don’t lose their roots. You can definitely taste Spain – there’s that hint of
classicism’ and veteran Spanish expert John Radford agrees. ‘Unmistakeably
Rioja, and a fascinating combination of traditional and modern.’
Sherwood concedes however it isn’t in the same league as its
sister wines, whose ‘huge recognition’ and reputation mean they fly off the
shelves. ‘It’s a modern style and it’s just finding its feet. It never really
got the traction the other wines have.’
After our morning of tasting at Murrieta, Cebrian, Vargas
and I head off for a late lunch in Logroño. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ he
says, pulling a Castillo Ygay 1959 out of his bag.
It was bottled in 1989 after 30 years in barrel, with no
racking, just topping up, and it is
sublime. Sprightly, bright and clean, with an extraordinary flavour of sweet
quince, prunes and pot pourri, and sweet refreshing tannins.
We taste it alongside the 2004 Ygay. ‘You can see the family
resemblance. They have the same structure. They are brothers,’ Vargas says.
This, I think, is unmistakeably Rioja. The 2004 is a superb
mouthful of black cherry, black pepper and silky tannins, but it is a mere
child beside the aristocratic 1959. How do they see it evolving?
‘It’s going to be great,’ Cebrian says. Then he adds,
swirling the 59 in his glass, ‘But with this in mind, it is quite a
responsibility.’
Marques de Murrieta
wines:
Pazo Barrantes Albariño, Rias Baixas, Galicia
100% Albariño produced at the Cebrian-Sagarriga family
estate Pazo Barrantes in Galicia, vinified in stainless steel
La Comtessa Albariño, Pazo Barrantes, Rias Baixas, Galicia
Newly-released high-end Albariño from Pazo Barrantes. Single
vineyard, aged 18 months in French oak and 12 months in bottle. 3800 bottles
produced in 2009
Marques de Murrieta Capellania Viura, Rioja
100% Viura from parcels grown at 300m on the Ygay estate,
aged 15 months in new French oak
Marques de Murrieta Reserva, Rioja
Tempranillo, Garnacha Tinta, Mazuelo, Graciano, all from the
Ygay estate. Aged 20-22 months in American oak of which at least 8 months in
new barrels. One year in bottle before release
Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva Especial, Rioja
Tempranillo and Mazuelo from the finest Ygay plots. Only
produced in the best vintages. Up to 30 months years in American oak, of which
at least 10 months in new barrels, and 3 years ageing in bottle.
In the very best years the wine is left in barrel of decades:
the 1978 was bottled in 1998 and released in 2007. The next releases will be
the 1980, followed possibly by the 1982 and the 87. Since 2000, the Gran Reserva Especial has
come exclusively from the La Plana vineyard on the estate
Dalmau
The ‘statement’ cuvée, a blend of Tempranillo with less than
10% Cabernet Sauvignon and Graciano, all from the estate. Aged for up to 20
months in new French oak. The first vintage was 1994.
