Introduction
What makes the Rioja region of Spain a must-visit destination for wine lovers? What are the best food pairings for Rioja wines? What’s the sticky history behind the Battle of Wine festival in La Rioja?
In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I’m chatting with Adam Lechmere, editor of The Smart Traveler’s Wine Guide to Rioja, among other books in this series.
You can find the wines we discussed here.
Giveaway
Two of you will win a copy of the terrific new book, The Smart Traveller’s Wine Guide to Rioja, written by Fintan Kerr and edited by our guest Adam Lechemere.
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Highlights
- What was it like to interview the famous movie director and winery owner Francis Ford Coppola?
- Are there parallels between the worlds of wine and film?
- Why did documentary filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter walk out of his interview with Adam?
- Why was Adam banned twice from Château Latour?
- What surprising insight did Adam learn while editing The Smart Traveller’s Wine Guide to Rioja?
- How is The Smart Traveler’s Wine Guide written especially for wine-interested tourists?
- What’s the biggest misconception people have about Rioja and its wines?
- Where is Rioja geographically located?
- What are some of the culinary traditions you can enjoy in Logroño, the capital of La Rioja?
- Which Rioja and tapas pairings should you try?
- What’s the history behind the Battle of Wine and El Barrio de la Estación de Haro?
Key Takeaways
- What makes the Rioja region of Spain a must-visit destination for wine lovers?
- As Adam explains, what they do so brilliantly in Rioja is combine traditional winemaking and outstanding wines with ultra-modern, avant-garde buildings often next door to ancient, gorgeous medieval churches. Of course, the Marques de Riscal winery and hotel are a wonderful example as is the Viera Hotel, which Adam says looks like a collection of white boxes that have just literally been dropped from the sky. They’re all higgledy piggledy, all angles. You can go from the door of this hotel to a medieval church in about ten steps.
- What are the best food pairings for Rioja wines?
- Lamb and Rioja is a brilliant combination, according to Adam and I agree. The rule of thumb for any wine region is to pair it with the food that’s made in the region. What grows together, goes together. Lamb is grown and raised in huge numbers in the Rioja hills. They prepare lamb in different ways, depending on the time of year. He particularly loves lamb cutlets, very thin cutlets. They burn a large bundle of vine cuttings from previous vintages, so they’re dried vine twigs on the grill, which they also do in Bordeaux. They flare up about four feet and then die down to this intensely hot, aromatic ash, which is good to cook on for about ten 12 minutes. It creates this intense heat without flame. And so they grill lamb chops on that and that with a glass of any Rioja and literally any wine from the top to the bottom, it just goes beautifully.
- What’s the sticky history behind the Battle of Wine festival in La Rioja?
- As Adam observes, when you have lots of anything that is also your livelihood, you celebrate it. The Battle of Wine festival is a series of processions that begins about a week before on the 23rd of June, and it culminates with everybody going up onto the hill to what they call the temple. This is after everybody’s been drinking and partying all night and then they throw wine all over each other. People chuck bags of wine at each other and upend buckets over their heads and end up absolutely drenched in wine. Like a lot of these festivals, it goes back into the mists of time and people don’t know exactly how it started.
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About Adam Lechmere
Adam Lechmere is the publishing director of Academie du Vin Library, contributing editor to Club Oenologique, and general manager of the Academie du Vin Foundation, a charity dedicated to improving diversity in wine and hospitality worldwide.
Formerly editor of Decanter.com, which he launched in 2000, he has been writing about wine for 25 years, contributing to Decanter, World of Fine Wine, Meininger’s, janeanson.com, the Guardian and other publications; at the end of 2018, he launched Club Oenologique.
In the late 90s, he was at the BBC, writing for and producing websites for the newly-launched BBC Online; he worked for several years as a travel writer, publishing books on Mozambique, the United States and South America; he also spent some years selling celebrity gossip stories to the tabloid press. He lives in London.
Resources
- Connect with Adam Lechmere
- Unreserved Wine Talk | Episode 162: Sherry, Rioja, Cava and Other Spanish Wine Gems with Interpreting Wine’s Lawrence Francis
- My Books:
- Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce,Defamation, and Drinking Too Much
- Audiobook:
- Audible/Amazon in the following countries: Canada, US, UK, Australia (includes New Zealand), France (includes Belgium and Switzerland), Germany (includes Austria), Japan, and Brazil.
- Kobo (includes Chapters/Indigo), AudioBooks, Spotify, Google Play, Libro.fm, and other retailers here.
- Wine Witch on Fire Free Companion Guide for Book Clubs
- Audiobook:
- Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines
- Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass
- Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce,Defamation, and Drinking Too Much
- My new class, The 5 Wine & Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner And How To Fix Them Forever
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Thirsty for more?
- Sign up for my free online wine video class where I’ll walk you through The 5 Wine & Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner (and how to fix them forever!)
- You’ll find my books here, including Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines and Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass.
- The new audio edition of Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass is now available on Amazon.ca, Amazon.com and other country-specific Amazon sites; iTunes.ca, iTunes.com and other country-specific iTunes sites; Audible.ca and Audible.com.
Transcript
Natalie MacLean 00:00:00 What makes the Rioja region of Spain a must visit destination for wine lovers? What are the best food pairings for Rioja wines? And what’s the sticky history behind the Battle of Wine Festival in La Rioja? In today’s episode, you’ll hear the stories and tips that answer those questions in our chat with Adam Lechmere, editor of The Smart Traveler’s Wine Guide to Rioja, among other books in this series. By the end of our conversation, you’ll also discover why many people assume that all Spanish wine is from Rioja. How the Smart Traveler’s Wine Guide series is ideally suited to wine interested visitors. Some of the culinary traditions you can enjoy in Lugano, the capital of La Rioja. Which Rioja wine and tapas pairings you should try. The surprising insight about Rioja that Adam learned while editing The Smart Traveler’s Wine Guide to Rioja. What it was like to interview the famous movie director and winery owner Francis Ford Coppola in his own home. The parallels between the worlds of wine and film. Why documentary filmmaker Jonathan Rossiter walked out of his interview with Adam. And why Adam was twice banned from Chateau Latour in Bordeaux. All right, let’s dive in.
Natalie MacLean 00:01:14 Do you have a thirst to learn about wine? Do you love stories about wonderfully obsessive people, hauntingly beautiful places, and amusingly awkward social situations? Well, that’s the blend here on the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. I’m your host, Natalie MacLean, and each week I share with you unfiltered conversations with celebrities in the wine world, as well as confessions from my own tipsy journey as I write my third book on this subject. I’m so glad you’re here. Now pass me that bottle, please, and let’s get started.
Welcome to episode 303. Two of you are going to win a copy of the terrific new book, The Smart Traveler’s Wine Guide to Rioja, written by Fintan Kerr and edited by our guest, Adam Lechmere. All you have to do is email me and let me know that you’d like to win. I’ll choose two people randomly from those who contact me.
In other book news, the new audiobook of Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation and Drinking Too Much is on sale now for 60% off. So that’s just eight buck at audiobooks.com until September 23rd, so only about another week. That’s at audiobooks.com. You can also get it from Audible.com, Kobo, Spotify, Google Play, Libro.FM and wherever else you get audiobooks. If you started listening to the audiobook or are reading the paperback or e-book, please let me know. I’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. I’ll put a link in the show notes to all retailers worldwide at nataliemaclean.com/303. Okay, on with the show.
Adam Lechmere is the publishing director of Academy du Vin Library and consulting editor to Club Oenologique, which he launched in 2018. He is also the general manager of the Academy du Vin Foundation, which is a charity dedicated to improving diversity in wine and hospitality worldwide. Adam has been writing about wine for 25 years. He has been contributing to Decanter, World of Fine Wine, Meininger’s, janeanson.com, The Guardian and other publications. He joins me now from his home in London. It’s so great to have you here with us, Adam. Thank you for joining us.
Adam Lechmere 00:03:56 Hello, Natalie. Good to see you.
Natalie MacLean 00:03:58 All right. Cheers. So, before we dive in to the new book on Rioja, I’d love to touch on some of your most memorable wine moments over your long career. Maybe starting with your interview of the famous movie director in California, winery owner Francis Ford Coppola.
Adam Lechmere 00:04:15 Well, yes, that was a really fantastic couple of days, actually. I went to Inglenook in Napa to meet Coppola. This is 2011, and the occasion was Francis Ford Coppola had been buying the winery and the winery buildings at Inglenook for some years. He’d been gradually increasing what he owned.
Natalie MacLean 00:04:33 And that’s a really historic winery, isn’t it?
Adam Lechmere 00:04:36 It’s one of the legendary Napa wineries. Yes, it was started by the Finnish fur trader and ship captain Gustave Niebaum in the 1890s, and then during the 20th century, it was sold off to a group called the Wine Group and lost all its sheen, lost all its reputation. The Wine Group turned Inglenook into a jug wine, a bottom shelf jug wine. But, Coppola always knew that it had the finest vineyards there on the Rutherford bench. For many years made a wine he called the wine Rubicon. And also there’s a couple of others as well, because he couldn’t call it Inglenook because he didn’t own the name. So in 2011, he finally managed to buy the name from the Wine Group, and then he could start calling his wine Inglenook again. I asked him how much it cost him, and he said it cost him as much as to buy the mansion itself. Inglenook and the mansion cost him $14 million. So I think the actual buying the copyright to that name, the trademark was expensive. But his winemaker, he just employed Philippe Pascal, who was the winemaker at Chateau Margaux. He poached him from Margaux, in fact. And Phillipe was there when I was there, and he’d barely started. So he was exploring the vineyards almost in the same way that I was at that stage, obviously knew them a good deal better than I did. So we walked the vineyards together, and then we sat down with Mr. Coppola and we interviewed him, and then we had lunch with him. He gave us dinner at the mansion. T-Bone steak, which he cooked himself. Fancies himself, is a great cook. And Eleanor was there, Eleanor Coppola was there, his wife, who is a considerable person in her own right obviously. About probably, say, half the size and weight of her husband. But a really, really remarkable person is amazing to sit down with those two, amazing to talk about film and talk about wine. And if you’re a huge fan of Coppola as I am, then that was equally exciting.
Natalie MacLean 00:06:29 Absolutely. I mean, he’s made so many iconic films. I mean, just I’m sure most people are familiar, but like Dracula. And what was the one about the war? Was it Apocalypse Now? Was that his?
Adam Lechmere 00:06:40 Indeed, Apocalypse Now was. Well, obviously his famous films of The Godfather trilogy is what made his name. And then Apocalypse Now, I think is as iconic and as famous. And of course, Eleanor, his wife, made a documentary about Apocalypse Now.
Natalie MacLean 00:06:55 I didn’t know that.
Adam Lechmere 00:06:55 And the name has just suddenly left me. It’s a brilliant documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, because everybody went slightly mad on set, because it went massively over budget. It just got very, very heated. And I still think it’s an amazing film.
Natalie MacLean 00:07:11 It is, it is. And you can see a lot of this memorabilia in the… he has a winery, I think right beside it, the Francis Ford Coppola Winery, where he has the desk from The Godfather and an old car from one of the movies. I forget which one that was, but you can see a lot of that memorabilia in the other winery, right?
Adam Lechmere 00:07:28 Yeah. That’s the car from Tucker.
Natalie MacLean 00:07:30 Oh, yeah. Tucker.
Adam Lechmere 00:07:31 Yeah, yeah, he’s got the Godfather desk. He’s got the powerboat. You know, the patrol boat from Apocalypse Now is up there on the hill. I think they had to make several versions of it. I think it’s just made of plywood. It’s not kind of seaworthy. I think that’s a model that he’s got there. I can’t remember where all the memorabilia is now. I don’t want to send people all the way to Inglenook just hoping to see lots of Apocalypse, iconic movie memorabilia there, because I think a lot of it might still be in the Francis Ford Coppola Winery. But he’s also sold that now. That’s in Sonoma. Oh, yes, that’s been sold. So don’t quote me on that. If you want to go there, you have to look it up.
Natalie MacLean 00:08:03 Absolutely. And did he have insights or did he say anything surprising, anything about the intersection of wine and film or why he was passionate about both?
Adam Lechmere 00:08:12 Not really, to be honest. He’s a very, very focused man. The interview was about wine. My job was to interview him about wine. And I, of course, wanted to get into film and he talked about a couple of the movies he was making, and this was ten years, 12 years ago, remember. But really, we didn’t talk that much about the films. Well, I mean, he talked about how Apocalypse Now bankrupted him. As a result, he had to make quite a lot of films that he might not have made otherwise. Things like Peggy Sue Got Married. He made a lot of films that were really just in order to bring the cash in. And they’re still great.
Natalie MacLean 00:08:46 Films parallel with wine. Well, indeed.
Adam Lechmere 00:08:48 And yeah, he obviously talked about the business of directing a film. He’s quite a witty sort of guy, and he was talking about how he knows nothing about film, he knows nothing about wine, he just knows how to employ the right people, basically. And I find a lot of extremely successful people often kind of say that their major skill is their ability to read character, and their ability to employ the right people and get the best out of them. So of course, there he employs Philippe Pascal, who was one of the best jobs in Bordeaux, obviously at Chateau Margaux, but also quite young and quite new in that. And Philippe is now back at Margaux and is working at both properties and is now very senior at Margaux. But yeah, the idea that you get the right people to work for you, I think is very potent with with successful people.
Natalie MacLean 00:09:34 Absolutely, absolutely. Definitely a thread that goes through it all. Now, you also interviewed the documentary filmmaker Jonathan Norster. He made the documentary about the wine world, Mondo Vino. What happened with that interview? Turned out quite differently.
Adam Lechmere 00:09:49 Well, yes. I mean, we’re going back into the mists of time here because this was back in 2005 or something. He made this film Mondo Vino. I’ve got no gripe with Jonathan Norster whatsoever, but I never liked that film. I thought it was very much a polemic. He had a point of view, and he wants to get that point of view across. And the point of view was sort of basically, very simply corporation bad, artisan good. And this was at the stage when the Mondavi family wanted to buy land in the Languedoc in the south of France, very close to the very famous producer. There was a feeling in the region at the time that the big corporation was going to come in and take over and ruin everything for the tiny artisan producers, which wasn’t the case at all. The Mondavi are a very serious operator. I just didn’t like the way the film was, sort of portrayed them, Mondavi and portrayed a lot of people in Napa. You know, it’s very unkind to a lot of people. And also taking the view that everything Michel Rolland did was bad, you know?
Natalie MacLean 00:10:50 The flying consulting winemaker who famously consults all over the world.
Adam Lechmere 00:10:55 Exactly. And this was at a time in the mid 2000 when bashing Michel Rolland was a very popular thing, and bashing Robert Parker was a popular thing as well. We won’t get into Parker now, but anyway, I put this to him in the interview very early on. I didn’t attack him or anything, but I said I think your films are polemic, which I suppose was quite an insulting thing to say in a way, because nobody likes to be told they’re a polemicist. And he walked out. And I suppose that sort of some people say that the best interviewer is the one that interviewee walks out of, because, after all, it’s not our business to become friends with the people we interview. But having said that.
Natalie MacLean 00:11:30 That’s true.
Adam Lechmere 00:11:33 Hadn’t anything to do with Jonathan Norster for many, many years. And he’s a serious filmmaker, and he was then a serious filmmaker. He’s making tomato sauce now in Umbria, I’m told. I think he’s given up filmmaking, but I don’t want to sort of rake over any old coals, you know?
Natalie MacLean 00:11:44 No, no. But, you know, it takes all types. And I’m sure you’ve had so many other interviews too, with different reactions. And so now, speaking of more mischief, but you’ve been visiting Bordeaux for 25 years, doing annual tastings and so on, or maybe more than that, but you were banned twice from one of the top five estates, Chateau Latour. Why was that?
Adam Lechmere 00:12:06 Well, yes, again, I mean, it’s not something that has any great moment at all. It’s not particularly important. I’m not sure I should be going into this, really. It might sort of open some old wounds, but we did a April Fool when I was at Decanter where we said that the North Korean leader, Kim Il Jong, had bought the entire consignment of Les Forts de Latour the second wine of Chateau Latour. We sort of made it very elaborate, and we quoted Frederick Orangerie, the director, and we quoted Kim Il Jong saying that he was delighted to get a jump on the Chinese. At that stage, they’re buying lots of properties in Bordeaux and buying up Bordeaux, and it didn’t go down very well. It was a very stupid thing to do, actually, because I was at Decanter at the time, and we at the time were putting on a tasting with all five first growths with, Sarah Kemp, my boss at the time. And Sarah Kemp is a renowned, an extremely brilliant publisher, brilliant businesswoman. She was rightly absolutely furious, but to her credit she didn’t fire me.
Natalie MacLean 00:13:08 I think that’s creative. Whatever trouble it might have caused, it was still better than the usual.
Adam Lechmere 00:13:14 It was quite funny, actually. I think a lot of people found it quite funny. It was only up on the website for about 20 minutes before we had to take it down, so.
Natalie MacLean 00:13:21 [laughter[] Oh my goodness. Okay, so before we dive into the book, two quick questions just again to get to know you through some of these different moments you’ve had. But if your mother wrote a book about you, what do you think the title would be, Adam?
Adam Lechmere 00:13:34 You warned me about this question. I’ve been thinking about ever since. I think the only thing that question illustrates is what. You’re familiar with. the works of P.G. Woodhouse with Bertie Worcester?
Natalie MacLean 00:13: 39 Yes, yes,
Adam Lechmere 00:13:41 Bertie Wooster. I mean, in one story, Jeeves pulled off some amazing feat and Bertie Worcester said, Jeeves, you’re so incredibly clever, you’re so intelligent, and, you know, have you always been like this? And Jeeves said, well, my mother believed me intelligent. And Bertie Wooster said, that doesn’t mean anything. My mother thought I was intelligent. So ones mother’s always one’s biggest fan. So I imagine my mother’s book would be something like my son’s brilliant career or something which is as far from the truth as you can imagine [laughter].
Natalie MacLean 00:14:13 It’s good to have supportive parents. My mother probably would have titled her book. I told you not to do that [laugghter]
Adam Lechmere 00:14:18 But anyway, possibly that’s another one.
Natalie MacLean 00:14:21 Maybe it was a subtitle. And if your high school yearbook had superlatives, what would you have been voted most likely to become?
Adam Lechmere 00:14:28 I have no idea. Well, presumably, my friends, presumably they would have said he’s going to do something. Enemies, I don’t know. I mean, what I’ve become is a world class procrastinator. That’s one thing I can say without any doubt.
Natalie MacLean 00:14:43 Doubt they had that category. But that’s good to realise your dreams. All right, let’s get into the book. What was the most surprising thing you learned while editing The Smart Traveler’s Wine Guide – Rioja?
Adam Lechmere 00:14:55 Well, yes. I’ve thought about this. I mean, I know Rioja quite well, and this is a book for. It’s not a specialist academic book, so there’s a lot of information in there that I already knew. But what I’d love to see was the incredible wealth of amazing architecture in Rioja and the kind of exuberance with which they’re doing things. And there’s a couple of hotels that we’ve put in there that I’d never visited. I mean, everybody knows Marqués de Riscal for example, the famous titanium clad Frank Gehry building that was designed to look like a flamenco dancer’s skirt. And that’s still…
Natalie MacLean 00:15:29 Oh, is that what it was designed to do? I’ve always wondered.
Adam Lechmere 00:15:32 I think that’s one of his ideas. The sort of swish of a flamenco dancer skirt over the vineyards. And that building is now 25 years old. I forget when it’s actually built, or maybe it’s just over 20 years old maybe. But it is still as surprising every time you see it. And in the book, we’ve got the most beautiful double page spread of the building. And what they do in Rioja so brilliantly is that they have the ultra, ultra modern, avant garde, post-modern buildings literally next door to these ancient, ancient, gorgeous medieval churches. So let me just remind myself in Villa Buena de Álava, you’ve got the Viura Hotel, which is the most extraordinary collection. It looks like a collection of white boxes that have just literally been dropped from the sky. They’re all higgledy piggledy, all at angles, and they sit. I mean, look up Viura Hotel in Rioja and they sit literally in the lap of the Church of San Juan, which is next door to it. And literally you can go from the door of the church to this hotel in about ten steps. It’s quite extraordinary. And again, we’ve got this gorgeous double page spread of this, and it’s just this perfect illustration of how in Rioja they celebrate their ancient, ancient history.
Natalie MacLean 00:16:46 So you find it still can work together?
Adam Lechmere 00:16:49 Yes. At the same time is celebrating modernity in just in the coolest way,
Natalie MacLean 00:16:54 That’s fascinating. I’m going to ask you, are you saying I believe I’m mispronouncing it because you would know. Are you putting a hard K on that? Rioja?
Adam Lechmere 00:17:01 No, no. Your way is absolutely fine, Natalie. We say we put the J in Spanish is the huh sound. So it’s halfway between a K and A. It’s the guttural. And so we just say Rioja. It’s actually sort of halfway between an H and a K. Really.
Natalie MacLean 00:17:17 Okay. Well I want to say it like the cool kids do.
Adam Lechmere 00:17:20 And we say Oh it’s a long Oh rather than an Oh. So you say Rioja. but we say Rioja. But then you say tomato, we say tomato. So, you know.
Natalie MacLean 00:17:29 There you go. I like that I want to say it like the cool kids do. So Rioja. What makes the Smart Travelers Wine Guide to Rioja different from other books? You said it’s actually not an academic treaties, of course. Is it meant to be just a traveling guide like you would get with Fodor’s? But the wine version?
Adam Lechmere 00:17:50 Yeah, absolutely. We think that we’ve actually hit a niche that is not being exploited at the moment. It’s basically a wine guide for travelers for wine interested travelers. And so it’s not in any way academic, but it’s for the kind of people who love to go on holiday to wine regions. And often we’ll choose a wine region for their holiday because they love visiting vineyards. And so they’re not professionals, but they’re just really into their wine. So they want to know a little bit more about wine than the average tourist. So with Rioja, for example, they really would like to get sort of deep into the difference between oak aging and single vineyard, for example. And they’ve got that kind of quite nerdy, sort of geeky interest in how appellation rules have changed. So we explain all that and we explain the difference between single vineyard and oak aging, and we explain about the kind of acrimonious discussions that went with that. But in a kind of very, very unthreatening way. When I briefed the authors, I always say can they pitch the information at the sort of I say sort of wine dinner party level?
Natalie MacLean 00:18:54 Right.
Adam Lechmere 00:18:55 So it sounds like go to the most boring dinner parties in the world.
Natalie MacLean 00:18:58 No, no, not at all. I’d love to go to one of those.
Adam Lechmere 00:19:01 A party where they say oh you know all about wine. Tell us about what’s the difference between a crusty port and vintage port, that kind of thing. It’s the sort of thing. And so we tell them all about the differences in the appellation rules and how the appellation rules have been updated for the first time in 100 years, but in an accessible manner. That’s basically it. And the reason we think we’ve hit a niche is because there just isn’t anything like this around. And we did a bit of research going to the big bookshops in Piccadilly. Waterstones in Piccadilly in London. We went down into the basement level. So in Waterstones in Piccadilly, which is a huge five story bookshop, the travel section is the entire lower ground floor. Literally thousands and thousands of travel books. The wine section is a shelf this wide on the third floor.
Natalie MacLean 00:19:48 Not very wide for those who are just listening [laughter].
Adam Lechmere 00:19:51 Sorry, I’m putting my hands about two feet apart. And we went down and talked to spoke to the wine buyer down there. We spoke to the travel buyer and said, look, we’re thinking of producing this book, which is going to be a travel guide to Bordeaux. It’s going to be called The Smart Traveler’s Wine Guide. And we love the title, by the way, because we think it just hits it exactly. And he said, this is fantastic. This is exactly what we want because people come in April, May. They say we’re going to Bordeaux. What’s a good Bordeaux wine book? And he has to send them up onto the third floor to buy a 500 page volume on one of the great tomes on Bordeaux, which doesn’t fit in your pocket. That’s the difference.
Natalie MacLean 00:20:25 That definitely is a niche. I absolutely love it. So you’ve done Rioja. What are the others? Burgundy, Tuscany or what are the other regions you’ve done so far?
Adam Lechmere 00:20:35 No, no, these are the first two. They’re not out yet. They’re out. The first two are out in October. So the first two are Rioja and Bordeaux. And then the second two in spring next year, Tuscany and Napa, and after that it’s Switzerland and the Rhone. And I mean Tuscany and Napa is obvious. Switzerland. The Rhone is obvious, Switzerland is less obvious, but it’s a great wine region. The Swiss make. The two great cantons either side of Lake Geneva are literally the Toblerone shaped mountains like that with vast valleys, and they are absolutely lined with vineyards. The Swiss make a lot of wine and they drink it all themselves. They’re thirsty people. But also Switzerland has a lot of tourism, so we’re trying to sort of teach people about there’s a slight sort of educational thing there as well going on.
Natalie MacLean 00:21:19 Sure, sure, a great concept. Okay, back to Rioja. What’s the biggest misconception you think that people have about the region and its wines?
Adam Lechmere 00:21:29 That’s an interesting one. I think going back a couple of years now, people think that all Spanish wine is from Rioja. They think Rioja is synonymous with Spain. And a lot of people might look at a wine from the Torres family and Penedes in the far north east of Spain, the top northeastern corner of Spain. A famous wine like the Sangre de Toro, which everybody knows, or the Vina Esmeralda. And they might think, oh, that’s Spanish top Spanish wine obviously. And I suppose another thing is that a lot of people still think that Rioja is absolutely only oak aged. You know, that’s the sort of famous thing that wine people know about is that it’s aged in oak, and that the aging system and the quality system is based on length of time spent in barrel and bottle, rather than on vineyard rather than on other vilification techniques or whatever. And that I think you’ve got a few more questions to ask me about that, but that is one of the major, most important changes that have happened in Rioja in the last 6 or 7 years. The change in the appellation rules which allows people to put single vineyard and smaller areas on their bottle. They’ve been celebrating single vineyards for years, but now they can do it legitimately.
Natalie MacLean 00:22:39 That is quite an advance. So let’s go back to that first misconception. You know, all wines from Spain are not from Rioja. Let’s situate Rioja on the map. First of all, Spain. South of France, east of Portugal. Where is Rioja on a map of Spain, say in relation to Madrid, maybe the major city that most people think of.
Adam Lechmere 00:23:01 Well, if you look at Spain as a square, which is kind of is a Madrid is in really in the geographical centre of Spain. You really can’t get much more, much more in the middle than Madrid. And if you go due north of Madrid till you hit the coast, you get to Bilbao.
Natalie MacLean 00:23:17 Which is famous for its architecture.
Adam Lechmere 00:23:19 Famous for its architecture. We’ve got the great Guggenheim built by Frank Gehry of Marquis de Riscal fame. And if you go down about a couple of inches from Bilbao, it’s an hour’s drive south of Bilbao and slightly to the east.So it’s really sort of between Madrid and Bilbao. It’s about two thirds of the way up there. So that gives us it. So it’s definitely northern Spain. It’s quite eastern as well. It’s not that far from the Pyrenees. It’s very near Pamplona. So it’s quite a sort of East ish and Atlantic influence. It’s eastern and northern really. So it’s quite Atlantic influenced rather than Mediterranean influenced.
Natalie MacLean 00:23:56 Right. Okay. And another place that the book mentions is I’m going to muck this up, but Longroño Tapas Trail. Maybe tell us where that is and what it’s all about.
Adam Lechmere 00:24:08 That’s Longroño, which is the capital of La Rioja of the province. And it’s just a really brilliant, dynamic, medium sized, brilliant Spanish city. It’s a working city. It’s got some wonderful, wonderful old streets. It’s got some wonderful old churches, wonderful old monuments, but it’s very much a solid northern Spanish working city where people just go about their business. It just has this, what they call the Tapas Trail in Longroñ. You asked about Tapas Trail, didn’t you?
Natalie MacLean 00:24:41 Yes.
Adam Lechmere 00:24:42 And it’s centered on one street Calle Laurel. L-A-U-R-E-L which is just a street of tapas bars, a narrow streets, pedestrianized with literally a tapas bar every five steps. And it’s just a rite of passage for anybody. Anybody who loves Spain, anybody who loves wine, anybody who loves anything to do with wine and food, that kind of brilliant sort of Spanish lifestyle, what they call La Marcha. You know, the sort of that just kind of lifestyle centrerd on food, centred on wine. And these bars are very, very basic. A lot of them, just blokes, women standing with one foot on the rail and you get slammed down a glass of the house red in front of you. A lot of these bars mind you will have great wine lists as well. We list the bars in the book and you also get a tapas. And most of these bars specialize in one particular type of tapas. So one bar will specialize, I can tell you the name in a minute. One bar will specialize purely in mushrooms, in champignons. And so you’ll get a tapa which is a wonderful, wonderful garlic fried mushrooms, for example. And you stay in there for 20 minutes, half an hour, have a couple of glasses of wine, move on to the next one, move on to the next one and carry on repeating that until two in the morning.
Natalie MacLean 00:25:56 I love that idea. Oh my goodness.
Adam Lechmere 00:25:58 Oh it’s brilliant. It’s a wonderful lifestyle. The Spanish lifestyle.
Natalie MacLean 00:26:01 And you called it La Marcha. The lifestyle? Is that what you said it was?
Adam Lechmere 00:26:05 No, it’s not so much the lifestyle La Marcha.
Natalie MacLean 00:26:08 Ah La Marcha. To walk?
Adam Lechmere 00:26:10 C-H-A-R, M-A-R-C-H-A. And it’s sort of this kind of energy that you get from seeing a brilliant flamenco dancer. It’s this kind of energy that has you going out at night and staying out for a long time, just talking and drinking and eating and not getting drunk crucially. It’s not that kind of drinking where you end up legless and falling into a taxi. It’s much more and of course you always eat as well because a lot of Spanish people would consider it uncivilized to drink without eating.
Natalie MacLean 00:26:40 Sure it is. What are your favourite pairings when it comes to the wine and the tapas there?
Adam Lechmere 00:26:46 Well, the famous. The most famous pairing in Rioja. This is a really a rule of thumb for any wine region, is that you go with the food that’s made. Its lamb in Rioja because lamb is grown and raised in huge numbers in the hills and lamb and Rioja is a really brilliant combination.
Natalie MacLean 00:27:03 How do they do it?
Adam Lechmere 00:27:04 They do it in all sorts of ways depending on the time of year. They do a lot of young lamb, Lechazo, which is less than a year old. And they do a lot of roast lamb. The one I particularly love is lamb cutlets. You know, very, very thin cutlets. And they do that. They get a huge sack full of vine cuttings, previous vintages vine cuttings, so dried vine twigs, which is big in Bordeaux as well. They call them sarten in Bordeaux,
Natalie MacLean 00:27:20 Sarten?
Adam Lcchmere 00:27:23 S-A-R-T-E-N Yeah. And you put a great bunch of these cuttings on the grill and he set fire to them and it flares up. You think you’re going to set the place on fire, flares up about four feet and then dies down to this intensely hot, aromatic ash, which is good to cook on for about ten 12 minutes. It creates this intense heat without flame. And so you grill your chops on that and that with a glass of any Rioja, literally any wine from the top to the bottom. It just goes beautifully.
Natalie MacLean 00:28:04 That sounds wonderful. Oh my goodness. Now what is the Battle of Wine Festival in Haro that takes place at the end of June each year. What happens during that?
Adam Lechmere 00:28:16 So the Battle of Wine . I’ve never been. I have to say to my shame, I really want to go. It’s the classic thing. You end up always being in a wine region at the wrong time, you know? And the Battle of Wine in Haro is the 29th of June, La Batalla del Vino. And it’s just one of those brilliant, brilliant wine festivals. I’m on a par with San Fermin, which is the famous bull running in Pamplona. There’s nice to have bulls and the Battle of Wine. Basically, it’s a series of processions and it begins about a week before in the 23rd of June, and it culminates with everybody going up onto the hill to what they call the temple on the hill. They pile up onto the hill. And this is after everybody’s been drinking and partying all night, and just proceed to chuck wine all over each other. We’ve got some brilliant pictures people come up with kind of kids water pistols, but really, really high tech water pistols as big as Kalashnikov rifles. And you just literally and people chuck bags of wine at you and they upend buckets over your head and you end up absolutely drenched in wine.
Natalie MacLean 00:29:18 Very sticky business. Who started that? What is the.., I guess it’s just celebrating the joy of wine? I don’t know, let’s pour it all over us?
Adam Lechmere 00:29:26 Yeah. I think like a lot of these festivals, it goes back into the mists of time and people don’t know exactly how it started. I’m sure it started probably in the I don’t know, I’ll look it up for you, but I imagine it started in medieval times, like the Tomato Festival. It is when you have lots of anything that is also your livelihood. You celebrate it. I suppose it’s this kind of just this kind of almost orgiastic kind of basic right. I said maybe in medieval times people actually sort of drowned in vats of wine through sheer exuberance and excitement, you know, who knows?
Natalie MacLean 00:30:00 Yeah. Well, that sounds like something to put on the old bucket list.
Adam Lechmere 00:30:06 On the bucket list. It’s the end of June. If you’re going to go at the end of June.
Natalie MacLean 00:30:10 End of June.
Adam Lechmere 00:30:11 I’m an American. It’s always packed with Americans these things.
Natalie MacLean 00:30:15 It. Any Canadians there as well?
Adam Lechmere 00:30:17 Sorry, Natalie. Yes. And Canadians obviously.
Natalie MacLean 00:30:19 That’s okay. Just wondering. Asking for a friend. Cool. So yeah go and get sticky. So while we’re in Harrow, what is the barrio de la Estación? I don’t know. And why would we want to visit it?
Adam Lechmere 00:30:32 El barrio de la Estación. It’s absolutely key to the development of Rioja, to the history of Rioja wine and how it came about. And if you like, I’ll just explain that in a couple of sentences because it’s absolutely linked with the barrio de la Estación So very, very briefly when phylloxera hit Bordeaux in the 1860s. And as you I don’t need to explain what phylloxera is. Phylloxera is the louse…
Natalie MacLean 00:30:56 The root louse that ate all the vines. Yes, devastated them.
Adam Lechmere 00:30:58 The louse that feeds on the roots of vines and devastated the French vineyard, decimated the French vineyard. 90% was uprooted and killed. And so the French had a thirst for wine at the same time. And while this was going on, links had already been forged over the last 150 odd years, back to the 1780s, 1790s, links had been forced with the Rioja because Rioja and Bordeaux are quite close, and in the 19th century it would have been easier to get to Rioja from from Bordeaux than it would be to get to Paris. So there had been quite a lot of interchange of ideas between Rioja and Bordeaux. A few key figures had traveled up to Bordeaux. Studied Bordeaux winemaking methods brought them back to Rioja and explained it’s incredible what they’re doing up there. We’ve got to start making wine in big barrels that make Bordeaux so delicious, and they make it in big barrels. Let’s do that. Bordeaux do this type of ferment. They do a cold soak. They do this kind of press, etc. bring it gradually, gradually introducing those ideas to Rioja.
So there was already this kind of intercourse between the two regions. And so when phylloxera hit, Bordeaux started importing wine from Rioja in vast quantities, vast quantities. And a lot of this would have arrived in Bordeaux by train, but by horse and cart, before the train sort of kicked in, before the trains became viable. And it would have been relabeled clarets and sold on to London and sold on around the world. So this cemented the links. And while this was cementing links to Bordeaux because obviously the Riojcans were delighted to sell their wine in vast quantities at the same time as these sort of financial, commercial, economical links were being cemented. So all the ideas were being cemented as well. And so then about 1890, in order to make the links even stronger and to facilitate even more the export of wine to Bordeaux, the station at Haro was built as a way to get wine out of Rioja really fast. And so around that station built up key entrepreneurial Spanish and French winemakers and business people built their wineries just outside the station so that you could just chuck the wine straight on the train without any bother whatsoever.
And so that’s where you have Muga and La Rioja Alta and Cune and Lopez de Haro, Vina Tondonia. All those wineries were built around between in the last couple of decades of the 19th century and into the 20th century. And because they were so wealthy, they made very, very good wine. And those are the most famous wineries. And so from a traveller’s point of view, from a tourist point of view, to cut a very long story short, if you’ve got a day in Rioja, two days in Rioja, and you’ve only got like five wineries to visit go to Haro and these wineries are all within walking distance to each other. There’s one spot where you can take a photograph which has Vina Tondonia and Alta. You know, you can get it in the same frame. They’re so close to each other.
Natalie MacLean 00:33:52 That’s great. Sounds like Porto. All the port houses.
Adam Lechmere 00:33:56 It’s exactly like that.
Natalie MacLean 00:33:58 Yeah. Is there a bit of a museum there like the history of the region and that sort of thing?
Adam Lechmere 00:34:04 That’s a good question. And I shall refer back to the book. I can’t remember what the museum is in Haro now, but every winery, all the wineries they do extensive tours for different prices. You can spend €30, you can spend more. And they all have their own museums and they have their vast barrel rooms, for example, they demonstrate the ancient methods of changing barrels by hand, etc. Racking it’s called. So I’ll find out the name of the museum I can’t remember for now, but you have all the museums you need within the wineries. Basically, you’ve got the history of oeneology there, and they’re really geared up for visitors as well.
Natalie MacLean 00:34:40 That’s terrific. Wow, so many reasons to visit.
Natalie MacLean 00:34: 49 Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our chat with Adam. Here are my takeaways. What makes the Rioja region of Spain a must visit destination for wine lovers? As Adam explains what they do so brilliantly in Rioja is combined traditional winemaking and outstanding wines with ultra modern, avant garde buildings, often next door to ancient, gorgeous medieval churches. Of course, the Mark Driscoll Winery and Hotel are a wonderful example, as is the Viera Hotel, which Adam says looks like a collection of white boxes that have just literally been dropped from the sky. They’re all higgledy piggledy, as he says, all angles. And you can go from the door of this hotel to a medieval church in about ten steps.
What are the best food pairings for real high wines? Lamb and Rioja is a brilliant combination, according to Adam and I agree. And we as speaking about the Red Rioja wine, the rule of thumb for any wine region is to pair it with the food that’s made in the region. What grows together, goes together. Lamb is grown and raised in huge numbers in the Rioja hills, and they prepare it in different ways depending on the time of year. He particularly loves lamb cutlets, so very thin slices of meat they burn a large bundle of vine cuttings from previous vintages, so they’re dried vine twigs on the grill, which they also do in Bordeaux, and the flames will flare up at about four feet and then die down to this intensely hot, aromatic ash, which is good to cook on for about ten minutes. It creates this intense heat without flame. And so they grill lamb chops on that and that with a glass of Rioja, as Adam says, is just a beautiful thing.
What’s the sticky history behind the Battle of Wine Festival in Rioja? Well, it’s Adam observes, when you have lots of anything that is also your livelihood, you celebrate it. The Battle of Wine Festival is a series of processions that begins a week before the 23rd of June, and culminates with everyone going up to a hill to what they call The Temple. And this is after everyone has been drinking and partying all night, and then they throw wine all over each other. They literally chuck bags of wine at each other and up and buckets over their heads, and end up absolutely drenched in wine. And as you can imagine, that’s a sticky business. Like a lot of these festivals, it goes back to the mists of time and so no one knows how it exactly started.
In the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my conversation with Adam, links to his website and books, the video versions of these conversations on Facebook and YouTube live, and where you can order my book online now no matter where you live. If you missed episode 162, go back and take a listen. I chat about Sherry, Rioja, Cava and other Spanish wine gems with Lawrence Francis. I’ll share a short clip with you now to whet your appetite.
Lawrence Francis 00:37:48 Sherry is one of the most complex wines out there. Sauterne is always going to have this amazing length and intensity, but Sherry in the right hands you can almost just turn it up. There’s so many different colours and different flavours to paint from it. I think they’re on the right track and talking about how well it goes with food. Food is a wonderful way to hook people and to get them to want to know more about wine.
Natalie MacLean 00:38:15 It’s a great way into wine itself, but also categories of wine that have maybe suffered from misconceptions like sherry has often been pegged as the Oxford Don University Professor wine behind the books or granny’s wine or whatever. But it is complex. It’s nutty. It’s wonderful. It has this range of styles from sweet to dry.
You won’t want to miss next week when we continue our chat with Adam. If you liked this episode or learned even one thing from it, please email or tell one friend about the podcast this week, especially someone you know who’d be interested in learning more about the wines of Rioja. It’s easy to find my podcast. Just tell them to search for Natalie MacLean Wine on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, their favorite podcast app, or they can listen to the show on my website at nataliemaclean.com/podcast. Email me if you have a sip, tip, question, if you’d like to win a copy of Adam’s book, or if you’ve read my book or are listening to it at [email protected].
In the show notes, you’ll find a link to take a free online food and wine pairing class with me called the five Wine and Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner and How to Fix Them Forever at nataliemaclean.com/class. That’s all in the show notes at nataliemaclean.com/303.
Thank you for taking the time to join me here. I hope something great is in your glass this week, perhaps a robust Rioja to pair with a tender lamb cutlet. You don’t want to miss one juicy episode of this podcast, especially the secret full bodied bonus episodes that I don’t announce on social media. So subscribe for free now at nataliemaclean.com/subscribe. Meet me here next week. Cheers.
