The Bottle That Crossed the River

For years now I have taken the Ribera side. I could not defend it to a Riojano, who would have forty years of argument ready and would be right about half of it. It is a preference more than a position. When there was a Spanish red to choose and the choosing fell to me, I reached for the Duero, for the high cold country and the wines that came back darker, with more weight in them. A man develops these loyalties without quite deciding to. My wife, Ana, long ago stopped asking why the bottle was always Ribera.

The wine that fixed that loyalty was Corimbo I.

It was in Ronda, with Ana, in the summer of 2018.

Ronda is famous for its bridge, magical and historic. Beside it, at the new-town end, stands the Parador de Ronda. You can sit on its terrace and look out over open country to the mountains, with the bridge to your left. The bullring is a short walk away.

We had eaten tapas earlier, and towards sunset we were on that terrace, relaxing with a small drink and looking down the menu for something a little better. That was where I first saw Corimbo I. It was expensive for a glass. I cannot remember how many euros, only that it was a lot. Ana and I shared the one glass. It blew me away.

She had a different wine, another Ribera, I think, and we compared the two. You could tell the difference straight away. It was night and day, and for me it still is.

I do not know whether it was the wine, the setting, or maybe even the glass from the parador. Everything from that moment on stuck with me, and afterwards I started reading about Ribera del Duero.

It was the same trip on which Ana introduced me to padel. That summer I fell in love with Corimbo I, and with padel.

Corimbo I is the top wine of its house, the one the bodega itself calls its star.

Then a deal came up that was good enough that I bought several bottles at once, and I felt clever about it. It is easy to drink, especially with food, and Ana and I worked through those bottles slowly over the years, the way you do with something you know there is a finite supply of.

So I considered myself settled. The Ribera man, with his proof in the rack.

Then I looked properly at who made it.

Corimbo I comes from Bodegas La Horra, in the village of La Horra, in Burgos. The front label says as much: Bodegas La Horra, La Horra, Burgos, bottled on the property, Ribera del Duero, Denominación de Origen. It is Ribera exactly as advertised, and the label does not mention Roda. Bodegas La Horra belongs to Grupo Roda.

Bodegas Roda is a Rioja house in Haro, founded in 1987 by the Rotllant Daurella family over a nineteenth-century cellar in the Barrio de la Estación, the station quarter by the Ebro, where growers once stored the harvest that went to Bordeaux by rail.

My favourite Ribera, the wine I had leaned on for years to confirm a preference against Rioja, was made by a Rioja house. I had been flying the other side's flag the whole time. It was funny, and the joke was on me.

I had picked a side in an old argument. Rioja and Ribera del Duero are its two poles, and Spaniards have been having it for the forty-odd years since Ribera won its own Denominación de Origen: what should a great Spanish red be?

Both work with the same grape. In Rioja it is Tempranillo. A little over a hundred kilometres to the south-west, in Ribera, it is Tinta del País, or Tinto Fino. Further west, in Toro, it is Tinta de Toro. One vine, three names.

Rioja is the senior party. Its Denominación de Origen dates from 1925, and in 1991 it became the first region in Spain raised to the Calificada tier, DOCa. It is the region most associated with the ladder of Crianza, Reserva and Gran Reserva. The classic Rioja register, by most accounts, is built on time and restraint: long-aged, often in American oak.

Ribera is the newcomer. It was recognised provisionally in November 1979 and constituted as a Denominación de Origen on 21 July 1982, with about ten founding wineries. Today there are more than three hundred. The vineyards sit on the Castilian meseta at between 720 and more than 1,000 metres, where, by the Consejo Regulador's figures, the thermometer runs from minus twenty to forty-two. The wines, again by most accounts, are darker and more powerful, often with shorter ageing in French oak. That was the side I thought I had chosen.

Roda did not leave Haro. In 2009 Grupo Roda went into partnership with Pedro and Pablo Balbás, growers from the village, and set up a second house in La Horra to make Corimbo and Corimbo I from Tinta del País. Mario Rotllant, Roda's president, has said they went looking for another place where Tempranillo would be the star.

The vines behind Corimbo I average seventy years, in small plots in La Horra, Roa and the villages around them, and the wine spends sixteen months in barrel, in four parts French oak to one American. The old bush vines around La Horra are the ones Peter Sisseck, a Danish winemaker, turned into the first vintage of Pingus in 1995, Ribera's cult bottle. Roda's Ribera house stands in the same village.

There is good Ribera del Duero on supermarket shelves, and good Rioja beside it. Corimbo I is not cheap by the bottle. For an occasion, though, and especially if you can find it on a deal, I would tell anyone to try it.

I have stopped trying to decide which side is right. The bottle I built my case on declines to take one.

There is a temptation to drink a wine like this as an essay, next to a classic Gran Reserva and a brooding modern Ribera, and reach a verdict. I would rather do what Ana and I did with those bottles, which was to open one with something off the grill and not press it for a confession it had no intention of making. The grape, which has worn three names without complaint, never cared which one I thought I was drinking.

How this was written: from the author's own bottles, bought and paid for. The facts about the bodega are from Bodegas La Horra, Bodegas Roda and the Consejo Regulador of the DO Ribera del Duero; the winery was not contacted for this piece.