Riveting Riscal
Ben on Sunday 13 June
A visit I had been looking forward to for a while. This week I took the two prizewinners from Alexander House Hotels to Rioja to visit Marquis de Riscal. Riscal has the unique distinction of being both the oldest Rioja house (founded in 1858) and one of the most innovative. We drove down from a rain soaked Bilbao (the rain in Spain falls mainly in Bilbao apparently) along a pristine motorway, up and over the Sierra Cantabria which shelter Rioja from the north and down to Elciego, home of Riscal. As we rounded the corner we caught our first glimpse of the famous Riscal Hotel, designed by Frank Gehry (who also designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao).
This truly dazzling creation (of which more later) sits on top of a hill next to the 16th Century town – and somehow manages to blend in! We were shown round by our ebullient host Carlos. First stop the huge modern winery opened in 2000. This comprises a mighty 51 stainless steel fermenters and a computer control room straight out of Star Trek. If this building was a surprise, the underground cellars of the old Bodega were more what we had been expecting. Similar to those in Champagne, these warren like corridors house thousands of slumbering bottles – mostly of the Rioja Reserva. An annual production of 4.5 million bottles of all their wines put together breaks down into 4 million bottles of Reserva and a mere half million of everything else. So you can see how central the wine is to the Riscal identity. Down in these corridors men painstakingly racked (moved the wine to clean barrels) a barrel at a time. Carlos showed us the wine library, which is one of the most complete of its kind in the world. Here they have vintages of Riscal going back to 1868, and on very special occasions examples are brought out – Carlos himself having been present for a 3 pre-1900 bottle tasting the month before. Once back above ground, we visited the bottling line where, despite modern labelling machines, the large format bottles still require a tube of Pritt stick and a steady hand for their labels, and we were shown the ancient art of tying that kind of fuse wire around the bottle – although no pictures were allowed (presumably this is a closely guarded Rioja secret passed from generation to generation) Then our genial host led us through a range tasting, across the Rueda whites to the finest of Riscal’s fine reds. Particular highlights were the Finca Montico Rueda (Verdejo) and the stellar Baron de Chirel red (Tempranillo and Cabernet Sauvignon). Our palates suitably impressed, and appetites stimulated, we crossed over to the Gehry hotel. This building did not disappoint. Its layers of steel and titanium, like the sails of some futuristic ship, are coloured to echo the famous Riscal Reserva bottle – steel for the capsule, pinkish purple for the wine itself, and gold for the wire. If this sounds corny, in the flesh it really isn’t. We took the lift up to the very smart restaurant – here is a view from the balcony. 
The decidedly 21st century building looks out on the beautiful 16th Century cathederal – and both are equally striking. After a fine lunch and coffee amonst the Titanium sails, it was time to head down to Logrono for the fiesta de Rioja – tapas time!