Determined to create anew conversation around Rioja, the prolific and world-renowned winemaker teamed up with six of his growers to make a range in which each wine is imbued with a distinct sense of its place of origin
Telmo Rodríguez, you sense, doesn’t like to be labelled or pigeonholed. In London to present his latest range of wines – a fascinating set of single-origin Riojas – he immediately takes issue with being introduced to a group of sommeliers as a ‘driving winemaker’.
‘No, no, no, please, I hate that,’ he protests. ‘I’m not a “driving winemaker”, and I don’t make wine “all over Spain”. I haven’t even been all around Spain because it’s just way too big… Or they call me “enfant terrible”, and I’m 60 years old! It doesn’t make sense to me at all.’
Why do people say such things about one of Spain’s most dynamic contemporary winemakers? As with most clichés, a germ of truth lies within. Rodríguez has made wine in a lot of different Spanish locations – more than 12, at a conservative estimate – and that has inevitably involved quite a bit of time on the autopista.
As for enfant terrible… well, Rodríguez has a habit of speaking his mind: ‘The Rioja business is to produce as much as you can, as cheaply as you can… We want to create a red line between industrial Rioja and human-scale Rioja.
‘The Rioja model of producing 400 million bottles in three categories [age-based crianza, reserva and gran reserva] is dead. No one in fine wine can understand an appellation like that. Imagine Bordeaux with three age classifications…’
EARLY YEARS
You get the idea. While he’s happy for his wines to speak for him, Rodríguez still has plenty to add to the conversation. And, beyond the peripatetic career from Jerez to Ribera del Duero, and from Navarra to Málaga, his love-hate relationship with Rioja lies at the centre of his story.
Rodríguez was five when his father bought Granja Nuestra Señora de Remelluri, a former monastery in Rioja Alavesa with a history of wine-growing dating back to the 14th century. He left to study oenology in Bordeaux, and in France he found role models: Bruno Prats at Château Cos d’Estournel, Eloi Dürrbach at Domaine de Trévallon, Gérard Chave in Hermitage. He also discovered, within himself, a determination to make high-quality wines redolent of place. Areturn to Remelluri in the early 1990s, however, brought an illusion-shattering reality check. ‘When I came back home to Spain, my dad said: “Telmo, you can’t make a great wine here, because the country and the market is not interested. England is not interested in a great wine from Spain, they just want a Rioja with oak and as cheap as possible.” That for me was a nightmare. I couldn’t understand why Spain, the most complex country in Europe, was just se
