Today the first stop was Torremoron, in our minds a very successful little cooperative located in the town of Quintanamanvirgo (population 106).Bodegas Torremoron has been running since 1957 and has 300 members that control some 500 acres of vineyards.  You don’t have to be a math whiz to figure out that it’s a lot of folks with small parcels of land.   Naturally, for openers, we walked the vineyards…up a dirt road, across row of small hills and down the other side.  Here we saw some of the more memorable things of the trip.  The first was some really old vines, some reaching up to 120 years of age.  These plots have been here for a long time and generations of families have farmed these lands. 

A 120 year old vine, Steve and Kathy (less than 100 years)

As we came down the hillside and back onto a different dirt road that took us back toward the town, we noticed a number of small old structures and doorways that literally led into the hillside. The explanation of the various buildings was, effectively, they were work sheds that had been built over the years and used by various families for various reasons in the growing/winemaking process. As to the earth structures along the roadside, we were told there were the individual bodegas of the families.

For centuries individual families had stored their own wines in these caves dug down into the limestone substrata. Some of them went down 20-30 steps where the earth kept things naturally ‘temperature controlled. Steve, who is roughly the size of an NFL lineman didn’t make the trek down because the passage ways were built for folks a lot smaller.

Kathy went down and as 7-8 people (which is all that went down at a time and we suspect had the fire marshal of Quintanamanvirgo been there, the number would probably have been reduced to pairs) crowded in the small spaces at the bottom of the stairs, she tripped over a barrel in the dark cellar and slightly injured her knee (she was OK but that fact will play into something else later).

Then it was lunch time, which was quite a treat (Spaniards do know how to eat so long as you aren’t concerned about vegetable intake…hard to imagine what a vegan would consume in this part of Spain. Steve had seen this process once before, Kathy here for the first time had not. It all started with a big pile of grapevine cuttings which were set ablaze (again no fire marshal within sight).

Step1: Burn...Step 2: Spread....Step3: Grill

After the pile had burned to basically smoldering embers, the Torremoron folks produced racks of lamb chops and sausages that were then placed over the ‘coals’ and barbecued. We don’t suggest trying this at home but it is quite a process and the results are pretty delicioso. From that point some folks napped, others hiked to other vineyards, and a few, perhaps fearing that their blood alcohol levels were in danger of dipping, made their way to what may have been the town’s only bar roughly 50 yards from where the bus was parked. We popped into the for a visit to the WC (no, really) and a shot of coffee (which cost like $1) and couldn’t help but notice that there were 20-25 locals in the room in the middle of the day on a weekday, more folks that we had seen total outside in the entire town not counting the folks from Torremoron.

After a spell, the entire scattered herd made it back to the bus and it was off to Vizcarra. As to the wine, the 2006 Torremoron had been a wine of the month for us and a ‘90’ from Wine Advocate. We’ll reserve comment on the 2007 and 2008 that we tasted until they arrive, only saying that the 2008 might ultimately turn out OK. We’ll see. The people were gracious as could be, however, genuine salt of the earth/tied to the land types.  They had great raw materials in their old Tempranillo vines but the process, while quite fastidious, was pretty low-tech.

JC Vizcarra's brand spankin' new winery...

Everything was state of the art and we had ham, tortilla, etc at a long table set up among the tanks where we tasted the new wines from Vizcarra. Vizcarra, located in the town of Mambrilla and sitting at just under 3000’ elevation, is a winery that we had done very well with this year. Their Ines and Celia bottlings are spectacular ‘super-reserves’ and the 2006 JC Vizcarra is a notable value at $18.99 with an Advocate ‘92’.Check out the Vizcarras at winex.com. So we were interested in seeing how he did in the more difficult 2007 vintage. Vizcarra is the opposite of Torremoron.He had all of the bells and whistles. The sparkling winery had the look of something recently completed (there was still a little construction debris outside). Everything was gravity flow including a huge elevated bracket arm (they called an Obi I believe) that could transport a tank of wine to any spot in the winery (thus preventing the need for pumping, which gravity flow guys don’t want to do because they feel it beats the wine up too much). Steve had seen this only once before at another Ribera facility, Abadia Retuerta, nearly nine years ago. 

We had the opportunity to try a 1999 version of the Torralvo single vineyard which was sweet fruited by comparison and packed with spicy plum and berry fruit. with notes of coffee.  Nicely put together and certainly pleasing though I can’t help but think the breeding isn’t there to support a $70+ price point.  The 2006 Torralvo showed more layers abd grip, rich and sweet, persistent and somehow classier.  Not as easy going front to back as the Perfil we had the night before at Mibal and, as a consumer, for roughly $20 per bottle less, I’d buy the Perfil.  The Celia and Ines are made in silly small quantities (220 and 380 cases respectively) and fall into that dangerous category of being priced really high because they are so rare.  They are very good wines, certainly the equals of the high scoring (Wine Advocate 95 and 93 respectively) 2005s, and we wouldn’t bet against them in a blind showdown against some big gun Bordeaucx of equal stature.  But he marketplace is full of icon-priced Spanish wine with very short reputations.  Many of them are great but, as a buyer, I’m not sure how many of these kinds of things we need to have on hand these days. 

We slept that night at the beautiful Parador Tordesillas where Olé was going to hold a small portfolio tasting in one of the conference rooms the next day.

We realize we haven’t   put a lot of tasting notes into these.  Actually it is not our custom to share our opinion with suppliers, the competition, et’ al., so we don’t usually say much.  But this time we’ll run through our notes just to let you see the process.  The 2008 Vizcarra, their entry level ‘joven’ (young wine) was the first one done 100% gravity fed in the new facility.  This seemed like it needed to pick up some flesh and length but it is very young and may yet do so.  Tasting the 2007s didn’t take long because Juan Carlos Vizcarra decided that he didn’t like the reserve lots for Ines or Celia, or the single vineyard Torralvo well enough to bottle them separately (and charge $75-125 prices for them). So he put all of it into the JC Vizcarra bottling that will sell for around $20. It was one of the better examples of the vintage we tasted, not surprisingly, and it will be interesting to see how it fares against other similarly priced items when it gets here later this year.  It was pretty front loaded with cranberry and spice notes and an almost, as the French call it, crunchy nature to the fruit.  If the edges round out a little it will be a good drink but timing will be important.  (As a post script, we came back and bought more of the 2006 JC Vizcarra which was surprisingly still available…a bird in the hand and all).
 

Something in a fixer-upper?

The little bodegas definitely oozed with history. Thinking about all of the folks who had gone up and down these stairs over the course of hundreds of years, how much the world had changed over time yet this spot was still pretty bucolic. Some of the ‘structures’ were built using large cut stone blocks. A few had carvings on them and it was explained that some the locals had borrowed these stones from Roman structures that were in the area.