An absolutely wonderful bottle of 1999 San Vicente Rioja over dinner last night
convinced me even more, after my initial trip out to Rioja in June, that this is a region of great potential. This may sound strange given Rioja's huge popularity already, but there is definitely more to come from here. There are some very talented "modern" Rioja winemakers now who, rather like the top estates in Burgundy or Barolo, bottle up the produce of their finest single vineyards, each of which have their own climate and soil types, after careful hand tending and ageing in barrel with minimum intervention. Unlike traditionalists who uniformly age their best wines in barrel until the wine is ready to drink, the modernist does what any other top winemaker in the world would do and thats make a wine to be aged in bottle, allowing the subtleties of the wine to blossom as gently as possible. Coming back to the 1999, it was in remarkably good shape at 10 years old plenty of fruit, spice, bittersweetness, with great finesse and balance, I even felt that there was still a bit more to come from it. It was a sort of claret-cum-Burgundy-cum Barolo, a very interesting drop.
