Seeing the recent success of Ribera del Duero’s much deeper-coloured, more tannic and, often, more alcoholic wines, many producers are trying to ape this style. Unimpressed by a succession of younger and younger, duller and duller, yet dearer and dearer wines, Rioja’s old customers became disaffected. Rioja producers have since been confused by the canny fickleness of modern wine consumers.
The Gran Reservas, the product of many years in barrel, were pale, delicate wines representing Rioja at its finest. In the old days, quality was measured by time in American oak.
It was this flattering, easily appreciated character, and the fact that fully mature examples did not cost very much, that made Rioja the first non-French wine to woo non-Spanish wine drinkers in the late 1970s. The result of this prolonged ageing was to allow a high proportion of phenolics to be left behind in the bottom of the barrel, making bottled rioja a relatively pale, gentle, soft wine reminiscent of strawberries and stewed fruit. The wine is made from a blend of Tempranillo and Garnacha (Grenache) grapes aged for a considerable number of years in the sweet, vanilla-scented warmth of small American oak barrels. Rioja has traditionally been American oak's most expressive ambassador. Although both issues have since been addressed, other regions of Spain crept up while Rioja wasn’t looking and seduced consumers with high-quality, characterful wines in a generally more modern idiom. Rioja in north-east Spain was for long Spain's only high-profile wine region, but in the 1980s it lost many friends by overpricing and under-performing (a pattern which has recurred in Ribera del Duero now that it has taken over the mantle of Spain's most revered red wine region).
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