“Meet my girlfriends,” calls Telmo Rodríguez down the phone, laughing as he flips his camera to show two enormous shaggy-haired mutts. The skies are crisp and blue on the other side of the screen, the sun beating down on Remelluri, his family estate in Rioja Alavesa. The camera swings across the horizon as he introduces me to one of his team before rushing indoors to sit down for our call. There’s an almost frenetic energy to Rodríguez – and that energy is what in many ways defines the maverick winemaker, who has been one of the transformational forces in Spanish wine.  His parents purchased La Granja Nuestra Señora de Remelluri – a farm that has been home to vines since at least the 14th century – in 1967. Growing up on this special property, young Rodríguez went off to study winemaking in Bordeaux, then trained at properties including Cos d’Estournel, Domaine de Trévallon, Chave and more. He returned home inspired and excited to use his new-found knowledge on the family property in the early 1990s. But his father didn’t welcome Telmo’s ambition: the market didn’t want great or even good Rioja, he told his son – the market wanted cheap Rioja. Although he wasn’t allowed to make changes to the red, Rodríguez was given free rein to create the property’s first white wine. And that wine rocketed him to fame. White Rioja has always been niche (today just 9% of the vineyard area is planted to white grapes), but in the 1990s its future was looking uncertain – with the traditional, oxidised style of wines such as López de Heredia’s Tondonia Blanco fallen from grace, and many producers had given up on making these wines (as with CVNE’s Monopole Clásico, which has since been revived). Rodríguez wanted to create a wine of place, rather than a wine of style, and used complex field blends planted at higher altitudes to do so. Fermented and aged in a combination of tank and oak, Remelluri Blanco was unlike any other wine in the region. Robert Parker wrote of the 1996 vintage that it was “the finest white wine [he had] ever tasted from Spain”. The multi-variety blend doesn’t include the region’s trademark white, Viura, and is technically illegal – a fact that perhaps has only increased its appeal.  But Rodríguez was frustrated by his father, by the limitations put on him and his wines. Restless and with a rift in the family forming, he flew the coop to focus on his own project. In Bordeaux he had become friends with a fellow Spaniard, Pablo Eguzkiza, who had been working at Pétrus, and together they had already started making wine – beginning with an old-vine Garnacha from Navarra in 1994. With that wine, Compañía de Vinos Telmo Rodríguez was born.  Their vision was to make real Spanish wine – the wines that had been made before, as they saw it, France started to sway the industry. When the deadly louse phylloxera had swept through France in the late 19th century, killing its vineyards, the nation looked south, across the Pyrenees to Spain. Producers travelled there to make wine and feed demand, and Rioja in particular saw an influx of business and money – but this uplift also came with French influence. In Rodríguez’s view, this was the ruining of the trade – Rioja, which had once been a wine of site, became a wine of oak. And soon, across Spain, the variety that once defined its many regions was being over-written with international varieties. Spain became known for cheap wine – and producers were racing to the bottom.  “The worst are the British,” says Rodríguez. “They say they know Rioja and they know Sherry, but, in a certain way, the British market killed Sherry and killed Rioja because they are very happy to have a cheap Reserva for a few pounds.” The dominance of what he describes as “industrial brands”, the larger houses that buy in fruit from across the region, aged in American oak for “traditional” styles, and French for “modern”, is abhorrent to him.  “I’m sorry, you don’t know anything about Rioja. Tell me one village. Tell me one taste. Tell me one landscape. Tell me one mountain. Nobody knew anything,” he says. He explains how Labastida – a village neighbouring Remelluri – was once the Vosne-Romanée of Rioja, home to 330 different wine producers in 1680. But over the years, that history has been blended away.  Together, Rodríguez and Eguzkiza set out to uncover and reveal the Spain of yesteryear, working with old vines, native varieties and traditional methods to champion what they saw as the true Spanish wines. From their beginnings in Navarra, they looked to Arribes del Duero, to Rueda, to Málaga, to Aragon and back to Rioja, then Ribera, Toro and Sierra de Gredos.   “Now we are showing what is real,” Rodríguez tells me, with a sense of satisfaction. In Rioja, for example, they created Bodegas Lanzaga in 1998, looking to focus on the terroir around the town of Lanziego. The Consejo (regulatory body), however, didn’t allow them to use the name of a village on the label until 2017. For almost two decades they protested this rule, featuring the name on the label, but redacted (inspired in part by the art of Jenny Holzer). Today, there is a clear, and growing, movement of producers looking to focus on single-site expressions of Rioja’s best vineyards, shifting away from cross-regional blends and the dominance of oak. This echoes what is happening elsewhere in Spain, as producers focus on indigenous grapes and identifying what makes each of its varied regions unique. It’s a revolution – one that Rodríguez has been at the forefront of. It's easy to think of this rockstar duo as flying winemakers – having so many projects scattered around the country, only touching down briefly to sign off on blends before they’re off to their next event. While inevitably their schedule is intense, their focus is firmly in the vineyard and on reflecting each individual place and site – rather than crafting a range that speaks of their influence. “It’s a very honest approach to a place,” Rodríguez says. The references throughout our conversation only emphasise this: Burgundy, the ultimate “terroir” wine, is where he finds his inspiration; while the Super Tuscans are repeatedly scorned for their internationality.  Matallana is quite possibly Telmo Rodríguez’s most ambitious project to date. He and Eguzkiza first made wine in Ribera del Duero in 1998, and have slowly built up 21.5 hectares of vines around the region.  “My dream was to do a very good Vega Sicilia. I wanted to do the Vega Sicilia that I used to drink in the past,” explains Rodríguez, talking about bottles from the 1940s, ’50s or ’60s. Back then, he says, it wasn’t an estate wine but fruit was sourced from around the region. For him, Vega Sicilia is now too “Bordeaux-style”. He argues that while in Rioja the soils are quite consistent, Ribera del Duero is incredibly varied. They have chosen to work with a range of vineyards across five villages – Sotillo de la Ribera, Roa, Fuentecén, Fuentemolinos and Pardilla – ranging from quartz-rich or pebbly soils reminiscent of Châteauneuf-du-Pape to chalky albariza and clay-heavy sites. This diversity is what helps bring complexity to the wine, with each one producing a different expression of Tinto Fino.   The work involved in each of the Compañía de Vinos Telmo Rodríguez projects is painstaking, tracking down special parcels, reviving soils and replanting or grafting where necessary, working organically and biodynamically, to achieve the quality they’re looking for. For Bodegas Lanzaga, for example, it was over a decade before they produced the first vintage of their top wine, Las Beatas, from a 1.9-hectare plot of the same name (first made in 2011).  For Matallana, they wanted to track down the region’s very best, historic vineyards in each of the five villages. But it’s not been easy. All too often they’d been abandoned, some needed re-planting entirely, or otherwise re-grafting with massal selections, and serious work to bring the soils back to life. They wanted to work with unirrigated bush-vines and field blends – vineyards farmed as they might have been in the 19th century. And then there’s the complex ownership: to buy just six of their 21.5 hectares took seven years, purchasing tiny plots from 40 different families.  Although they’ve been making wine here since the 1999 vintage, it wasn’t ready until relatively recently – and Rodríguez considers the 2014 the first “real” vintage of the project. Before that point they had made three wines, a selection of fruit from the oldest vines that went into the “Grand Vin” Matallana, a second wine M2 and the unoaked Gazur from younger plots. “They were prototypes, we were learning,” explains Rodríguez. From 2014, there is only one wine, with a change in the label to reflect the shift.  As with the older vintages from Bodegas Lanzaga, the label shows a list of redacted vineyard names – which are still not permitted to feature on the labels in Ribera del Duero. “All those vineyards are the guarantee of the purity of our wines,” says Rodríguez. In fact, the label is embossed, so beneath the censored text, you can feel the names of these terroirs. He’s moved to reduce the oak, using some foudres and tinajas (amphorae), while also acknowledging that the wine needs movement and oxygen to polymerise the tannins. The result, however, is a more delicate wine. At the end of the day, he says, “We don’t care about the winery… our wine is the landscape, is the soils.” The difference between the “new” and “old” Matallana is striking. The 2020 is pure, vibrant – a mineral wine with crystalline fruit that speaks of place.  “I don’t want to be pretentious, but we want to create another iconic wine from Ribera del Duero,” says Rodríguez. There’s no shortage of ambition here – and they’re looking to increase production to around 40,000 bottles a year (up from around 25,000 currently). “It took us 25 years… but we knew we were doing something rare, different.” The latest move has been to partner with Jean-Guillaume Prats (currently of Ch. Léoville Las Cases, previously of Ch. Lafite Rothschild and Cos d’Estournel), and start distributing the wine via La Place de Bordeaux, to bring the wine to an even bigger audience.  Rodríguez is now 61 – but there’s no sign of him slowing down. “People say that I’m too old to plant vineyards,” he says, clearly finding such a thought absurd. He’s just planting three hectares he tells me – vineyards that will be amazing, he feels, maybe in 15 years’ time. On the day we talk, he had five local youths coming to meet his team, the children of local viticulturalists in Labastida; they’d be making wines together with the best 2,000 kilos from each of their family’s plots – a project that has been going four years. There’s no looking back from this vigneron, whose eyes are firmly on the horizon, as he continues to push boundaries and forge a future for those that will follow him.  Explore all wines from Telmo Rodríguez and Matallana or read more Editorial 

Telmo Rodríguez is one of Spain’s most famous names. Since the 1990s, he has been a controversial figure, fighting for the nation’s vinous heritage. We caught up with the relentless revolutionary to talk about his journey, the real Rioja and his most challenging project to date

Telmo Rodríguez is one of Spain’s most famous winemakers. We caught up with him to talk his journey and his most challenging project to date, Matallana

Telmo Rodriguez – the eternal battle

Telmo Rodríguez: the eternal battle

The official Hermitage appellation was established in 1936 but its global reputation dates back to at least the 17th century, when it became the official wine of the French Royal household, under Louis XIII. Despite its historical roots, just a handful of producers remain who act as guardians of its reputation today.   The largest landowner in Hermitage is Chapoutier, with Jean-Louis Chave, Delas and Jaboulet-Ainé along with the local Tain-l’Hermitage co-operative overseeing the vast majority of production today. In the last 20 years, an increasing number of smaller growers are also now starting to bottle their wine. Today, Chave and Chapoutier lead the way regarding the wine’s collectability, with Chave’s wines being the most difficult to source after their initial release.  Red wines are made from 100% Syrah and represent about 70% of the appellation’s production, with the white Hermitage made predominantly from Marsanne with a small percentage of Roussanne. A tiny production of Vin de Paille (a sweet wine made from air-dried white grapes) is also produced in the appellation when the climatic conditions are right.  The Hermitage hill is a patchwork of individual terroirs with a total of 20 separate climats or lieux-dits. Most notably, Chapoutier bottles a number of his top wines from these single specific sites, whereas Chave prefers to make a blend of the different lieux-dits. The hill is mainly made up of granite rock and this is where the best Syrah is grown, while the white grapes tend to be grown on the flatter eastern part of the appellation where there is more clay and chalk.   This granite rock towering over the village of Tain has long been the Northern Rhône’s most consistent appellation. With its steep gradient and south-facing position, the grapes regularly reach good levels of ripeness. As the climate has warmed, its granite rock, diurnal inference and moderate exposure help retain freshness in the wine, as well as power and intensity. The shape and structure of the hill also protects the appellation from the full force of La Bise wind (known as the “baby Mistral”). The wind tends to follow wet weather, improving the sanitary conditions of the vineyard by reducing the risk of fungal diseases, compared to neighbouring appellations.  The wines of Hermitage have fantastic ageing potential and are the longest-lived in the Rhône Valley, typically entering their drinking window at 10 years of age and holding for another 15 years comfortably and in top vintages much longer. Our own recent tasting of Chave’s Hermitage back to the 1940s proved the incredible staying power of these wines.  Here is a run-down of the last 20 years in Hermitage – looking at which are the best, the good and the not-so-good.  Best Hermitage vintages: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2012, 2010, 2009, 2006, 2005, 2003, 2001, 1999   Hermitage has been fortunate over the last 20 years when it comes to stellar vintages, with ideal ripening conditions and low outbreaks of disease being the norm for the majority of the last two decades. The 2017, 2016, 2015 vintages were three years in a row that saw the whole Rhône Valley blessed with ideal conditions; with 2015 arguably the pick of the three for Hermitage, with both the white and reds excelling. In 2016, Hermitage was hit by a hailstorm greatly reducing yields, though the quality of what was produced is superb. Hermitage fared better than most other major appellations in the Rhône in 2017, when excessive heat was an issue for others. The 2018 vintage has also proven fantastically successful in Hermitage, performing much better than others in the Rhône. It is a very ripe vintage (akin to 2003), but with better freshness.   While many of the top vintages of the last 20 years in Hermitage seem to mirror the top vintages of Bordeaux, Hermitage has proven to be more consistent with fantastic results in the often underrated 2012 and 2006, two vintages where Bordeaux struggled. The 2012 vintage wasn’t universally loved by the critics, but top examples have great tension and concentration, and it is another strong vintage for the whites.  In 2006 Chapoutier’s single vineyards in both white and red excelled, with both his Les Greffieux red and L’Ermité white receiving 100 points from Parker.   Good-not-great Hermitage vintages: 2000, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2014  These middling vintages produced some stunning individual wines, but as vintages more generally were affected by less-than-ideal weather. The 2014 vintage brought a cool, wet summer, which opened up the potential for greener-edged fruit and tannins. The best examples, however, have amazing freshness and vigour.  The white wines excelled in these slightly cooler conditions and are excellent. The 2013s lack a little intensity and concentration, as do the 2007s – which outlines perhaps the largest contrast in terms of climate conditions between north and south. The Southern Rhône baked in sun all summer and produced superb wines in 2007, while the Northern Rhône and the rest of the northern half of France sat under cloud and cool conditions. In 2011 there were some exceptional singular examples of Hermitage but generally the growing conditions were less than perfect.   Difficult Hermitage vintages: 2002, 2008  In 20 years, it is incredible that just two vintages really underperformed in the appellation. The 2002 vintage was plagued by a poor summer and heavy rainfall during harvest, which badly affected the quality of the finished wines. The 2008s are of much higher quality than the disastrous 2002s, however.  While the year suffered from a cool, wet summer, the whites – as in 2014 – performed very well, even if the reds did not. There are a handful of exceptional white wines from the single vineyards of Chapoutier in 2008. The reds tend to be a little green, although Chapoutier’s single-vineyard reds also performed very well. Considering the weather conditions, the team wisely reduced the amount of new oak during élevage to balance the lighter fruit concentration.  Read more Editorial

Despite being only 136 hectares in size, the hill of Hermitage is one of the most globally reputed, historical and iconic appellations of the fine wine world. We examine 20 vintages of the red and white wines of Hermitage.

We examine 20 vintages of the red and white wines of Hermitage from 1999-2018 from Chapoutier, Jean-Louis Chave, Delas, Jaboulet-Ainé, Tain-l’Hermitage 

1999-2018 Hermitage vintage guide 

Hermitage: Vintage guide 1999-2018 

A prince’s kiss rouses the cursed princess from a century-long slumber in Sleeping Beauty
but the man responsible for Bordeaux’s long-overdue reawakening was not a prince (this being the French Republic after all) but Alain Juppé, France’s former Prime Minister.  Bordeaux had been comatose, earning it the nickname la belle endormie, but the indefatigable politician has given the city the kiss of life. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007, it is now the most desirable place to live in France and was voted “European Best Destination 2015’. Bordeaux's renaissance is a real-life fairytale. Bordeaux was a “melancholy, unwelcoming place” just 20 years ago but the arrival of Alan
Juppé as mayor in 1995 has transformed the city’s fortunes, making its centre as elegant as its wines. Blackened buildings and abandoned warehouses are now a thing of the past and, with the arrival of the high-speed rail link, connecting the city to Paris in just two hours, living in Bordeaux is as aspirational as drinking its first growths.” When Juppé was elected as mayor in 1995, Bordeaux was not the modern and vibrant place it is today. Deputy mayor Stephan Delaux, who worked alongside Juppé for more than two decades, admits: “Bordeaux had a reputation as a melancholy, unwelcoming town. The town wasn’t modern – that is to say that in the town centre, cars, trucks, buses, car parks dominated. The building fronts were black, the waterfront was a relic of a once-busy
port; the warehouses [on the waterfront] were empty. The people of the city no longer knew they lived by a river – there was no life there.” He paints a rather depressing picture but throughout its history, Bordeaux’s sons have
portrayed the city in a none-too-flattering light: the novels of Nobel-prize-winning writer François Mauriac (1885-1970) whose bust now stands in the leafy public gardens, depicted Bordeaux and the surrounding areas as a bleak and uptight place to live in the early 20th century. Similarly, one of Alfred Smith’s (1854-1932) best-known works ‘Le Tramway devant les Quinconces par temps de pluie’ depicts a grey, wet day on the banks of the Garonne, umbrellas up and those without hurrying, heads bowed. It’s not a place you would have aspired to live.  Things didn’t get much better during the 20th century: local tour guide Veronique Baggio recalls a ramshackle apartment she lived in in the 1980s. “The building’s bathroom was in the attic so I had to leave my apartment to use it.  At that time the city was trying to push locals to improve the inside of buildings [to improve living conditions].  It wasn’t until the late 1990s that they started to focus on cleaning up the outside of the buildings and the public places.” Today, the buildings are impeccable – a mass sandblasting effort has unveiled the natural caramel and blonde tones of the local limestone, which were long hidden. Here and there, a few reminders of the past can be seen along its narrow streets: a blackened façade, as if smeared with charcoal.  Yet the renaissance of Bordeaux required more than a spit and polish. The length of the city’s riverbank had long been hidden by a line of ugly warehouses designed to cater to the needs of a port city. Since the 19th century, sugar and spices from far-flung places were unloaded to be reloaded by local timber and wine. The commercial port moved away in the 1970s from the city centre but the warehouses remained, as did the businesses that catered for the all-male docking crews.  Charles Sichel, export director of Maison Sichel, a wine merchant in the Chartrons district since 1883, explains:  “20 years ago there were a few seedy bars [on the quais] and where the new bridge is [Pont Chaban-Delmas] there were working girls. It was interesting taking customers out to lunch when there were girls standing in the doorways waiting for business – it was quite something – but I can’t remember them ever saying anything!” How times change. The waterfront is now the playground of the Bordelais, filled with joggers,
cyclists and prams promenading along its length; a place for concerts, festivals and open-air markets.  It is a sunny day and a Viking cruise liner lounges at the edge of the city centre overlooking children skipping in the water mirror, a slick of water that, as its name implies, reflects the classical architecture of the Place de la Bourse (Stock Exchange Square). It has become Bordeaux’s iconic postcard picture (and an unwitting urban water park) and represents the new face of the city – clean, bright and, dare I say it, fun.  The reawakening of the city has been noticed far beyond the city’s ring road; it has become the most desirable place to live in France, according to a survey commissioned by the Observatoire du Bonheur in 2015. Asked in which French city they would most like
to live, nearly one in five respondents answered Bordeaux – ahead of Montpellier, Toulouse and streets ahead of Paris.  Just an hour’s drive from the beaches of the Atlantic and three hours to the ski slopes of the Pyrenees, Bordeaux is now within commuting distance of Paris. A high-speed rail link (TGV) cuts the travel time between the two cities from more than three hours to two hours and five minutes in July 2017.  The spruce-up now continues beyond the city centre. Gliding north along the quai past Sichel’s office in the Chartrons district, the tram has started to deposit an unprecedented number of tourists in the Bacalan district. It’s certainly not the prettiest of suburbs, home to run-down docks, abandoned factories and a huge concrete mass that was once a submarine base, but the Juppé magic dust is now being sprinkled here and the opening of the Cité du Vin in June 2016, a towering sphere of gold and silver in a Frank Gehry meets Zaha Hadid-construction, is a pivotal part of its future. Tourists  - and most locals -  have had no reason to come here but that’s changing with 421,000 visitors walking through its doors in 2018. La belle endormie has woken up but the city continues to dream big. Sichel is rightly proud of his hometown. “Now, every time my customers come here they all comment on how beautiful the area has become. Juppé has turned this city around.” Explore more Editorial

Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007, it is now the most desirable place to live in France and was voted “European Best Destination 2015’. We explore the renaissance of Bordeaux 

Exploring the renaissance of Bordeaux, from being named a UNESCO World Heritage site to being crowned the most desirable place to live in France 

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