As you can see, we keep all our cobwebs and fungus," María-José López de Heredia told me during a recent tour of her fabled Rioja winery's dungeon-like cellars in Haro, Spain. "The spiders eat the cork flies," she said, "and the fungus keeps the cellars cool." We came to a Gothic tasting room lined with hundreds of bottles of R. López de Heredia's famed Viña Tondonia, both red and white — perhaps the most mythic of all Riojas. The bottles looked like stacks of 2,000-year-old mummified cats. María pulled a precarious, disintegrating cork from a 1957 white Viña Tondonia and rolled it in her hand. And indeed, tiny cork flies—like moths — spiraled around us.
"Who drinks 50-year-old white wine?" she asked. "In New York, they send it back sometimes in restaurants. They claim it's oxidized." We sighed. The folly of the consumer.
"It's not the modern taste," she went on. "White Rioja is a rarity even in Spain. We're constantly being told we can't make it. La Rioja Alta, a great house, stopped producing it altogether. Marqués de Riscal make their whites in Rueda" — a neighboring region. "No one believes in it anymore."
If ever the idiocy of the global wine culture needed to be demonstrated, the fate of white Rioja would be the easiest way. These lean, haunting wines are the equal of anything. But to contemporary taste, weaned on fruity jollity, they seem resinous and forbidding. They pull the drinker into another century, where he probably doesn't want to be: into a world of mold, patience, and muck. And, of course, one of elegance and refinement.
This is a watershed year for white Rioja. In January, the Organización Interprofesional del Vino de Rioja (OIPVR), the region's reigning body, determined that bodegas could now begin using nontraditional Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Verdejo in their whites. The 2007 vintage, then, could be the first in which Rioja blanco is made from grapes other than the time-honored trio of Viura, Malvasía Riojana, and Garnacha Blanca. Although none of the new grapes can be produced as single-varietal wines (or even make up more than 49 percent of a blend), the decision has set the wine blogosphere ablaze. Some Rioja makers welcome the news. Others, along with many fans of Rioja's signature (and perhaps now disappearing) style, decry the announcement as yet another blow scored by globalization against the wine industry.
María — the great-granddaughter of founder Don Rafael López de Heredia y Landeta, who was born in Chile in 1857 and entered the Rioja wine business by 1877 — poured me the bodega's 1957 Viña Tondonia Gran Reserva Blanco and then the '64, the '68, the '70, the '73, the '76, and a few years after that as well ($81.99 to $399.99; astorwines.com). I tried to scribble a few thoughts as I stood by a candelabra snowed with cellar dust. But, as usual, my pathetic notes, read later, simply recorded the inability of language to catch up with the tongue. María went to a wall and stroked a swath of penicillin mold. She had just explained that these blancos were made from Viura with a dash of Malvasía and fermented in Navarro oak vats like the large cubas in which the reds are made. The fermentation, she said, is "open." That is, it is controlled by windows and doors opening and closing, by natural changes in the air.
