Madrid is one of the most exciting—and exhausting—cities in Europe. It's the only place I know of where the term "all nighter" can apply to how ordinary people spend a Tuesday evening. But it's worth hitting the sack at a reasonably early hour—say 2 a.m.—in order to make a trip the next morning a couple of hours north of the city. There you'll find one of Spain's most happening wine regions: Ribera del Duero.
After passing through the chic northern district of the capital, where a noisy telephone workers' strike is doing its best to shut down the morning rush-hour traffic, the urban thoroughfare finally widens into a highway in the open countryside of central Spain. Ahead is the massive outline of the Sierra Madrileña, a range of mountains still cloaked in snow even when Madrid is beginning to feel the heat of spring.
The highway rises gradually but perceptibly, wending its way through broad passes. The bus seems dwarfed by the landscape. On the other side of the Sierra, vineyards begin appearing, scattered at first and then in greater profusion.
PHOTO COURTESY OF RIBERA DEL DUERO
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This is Ribera del Duero, the "banks of the Duero," the river that miles to the west becomes the Douro when it enters Portugal. In this part of Spain, the Duero is an unprepossessing brown stream that the tour guide almost forgets to mention as the bus rolls across a bridge and into the town of Aranda de Duero. In the 8th century, the valley of the Duero formed a no-manís-land between Christian and Muslim Spain. Today, it's a hotbed of winemaking.
I'm not accustomed to chowing down on a massive haunch of roast suckling lamb for lunch, so I get full very quickly at the rustic restaurant where we stop for midday refueling. Maybe it has something to do with the sausages, octopus, and sweetbreads that are served as an appetizer course. How far can you get from the starveling Perrier-and-a-salad lunches that obtain in West Hollywood?
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The best thing about the restaurant is the smell of the gigantic wood-fired bread oven where various cuts of meat are being slowly roasted. If there's one indelible Proustian association I've taken away from Spain, this is it. The ripe, lush and sexy Ribera del Duero wines, from the Freixenet's Valdubón estate nearby, are the perfect match for succulent foods like this.
The countryside in Ribera del Duero is open and generously proportioned, with soft vine-clad undulations and occasional hazy heights in the distance. Among the vines, thousands of crimson poppies flutter in the breeze. Due to the split inheritance of larger tracts by successive generations, the vineyard plots in Ribera del Duero are small today, most of them averaging about an acre in size. Some wineries own their own vines, but many producers establish contracts to purchase grapes from several growers. The main variety here is a local clone of tempranillo, called tinto del país.
One caveat: Never, under any circumstances, ask a winemaker in Ribera del Duero to compare his wine with Rioja. I made this mistake, and it set the tour back a good thirty minutes. Tinto , you see, means "colored" and the winemaker will go on at length about how the Ribera del Duero clone is darker and more extracted, darker and more meaty, darker and more ageworthy, darker and more delicious, darker in every way, don't you see, than Rioja. It's darker on the vine, darker in the glass, and darker on the palate. He might even hold up a glass of his Ribera del Duero to the light and ask you to try reading the newspaper through it—a feat which is, admittedly, impossible. The stuff is darned dark.
Ribera del Duero is home to Spainís single most legendary wine, Vega Sicilia. Founded in the mid-19th century, Vega Sicilia still sets the hurdle which newer wineries—including cult producers like Pesquera and Pingus—are out to clear. With competition keen, Ribera del Duero has become nearly synonymous with the "new" Spanish wines: highly extracted and forward, and treated with lavish amounts of new oak. If you want a good introduction to Spanish wine in its contemporary, international guise, you could hardly do better than to try a good example of Ribera del Duero.
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Wines from Valdubón, a Freixenet-owned estate in Ribera del Duero.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FREIXENET USA
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The wines can be immense but are immediately accessible. For anyone accustomed to drinking California Cabernet, they have an almost familiar style and appeal. Ribera del Duero is Spain's newly minted currency in the world wine market, and it's taking its rightful place on the cutting edge of Spanish wine today.
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