There may be many different reasons for it, but the conclusion is clear. Compared to France, the wine-growing regions of Spain are a relatively recent invention. Only the Rioja region is officially more than 80 years old, only 13 regions are older than 50 years, many were created either shortly after the end of the Franco dictatorship, or only came about in the boom phase of the 1990’s. In Castilla y León, the D.O. Ribera del Duero is the second oldest after Rueda, which is only two years older. It may nevertheless come as a surprise that almost half the Denominaciones de Origen are older than Ribera del Duero.

 

At the time, the founding fathers of the region had only one objective in mind: to create a proper, regulated production and marketing environment. Nobody at the time had dared to think that only a decade later they would be turning the world of Spanish wines upside down, and would, in terms of quality at least, be attacking the predominant position of Rioja. A lot has changed since then: the number of bodegas has exploded, going from 13 to 230, and the total vineyard area has grown from 5.000 hectares to 20.000 hectares, and who knows what is still to come.

The stars from the outset

Naturally, Vega Sicilia deserves a mention here. It is thanks to Vega, for instance, that Malbec has been permitted as a variety in Ribera. When the D.O. was founded, the estate had this variety planted in its vineyards. That meant either including Malbedc in the regulations, or excluding Vega. What followed was one of the few really good decisions of the Consejo Regulador. Today Vega Sicilia bears the bottling number 001, the first bodega of the D.O. to be registered.

Barrel cellar at Bodegas Neo

 

However, this is a small gift, presented by another winery. In fact, Vega initially had the much less prestigious registration number 011 – while the number 001 was allocated to Protos, at that time still the Cooperativa Ribera del Duero. In fact, Protos was and still is the bodega that made Ribera del Duero famous in Spain. Wherever you go into a restaurant in Spain, if they serve wine from Ribera del Duero, you will be sure to find a Protos wine there. No other producer has such a fine-meshed distribution network as does this huge  and active winery, which today processes five million kilogrammes of grapes annually, and is currently working on a new futuristic bodega complex, designed by Norman Foster.

 

Protos was instrumental in determining the style, as was its international counterpart, Tinto Pesquera. Both wineries are keen on using barrricas of American oak for their wines, both favour vanilla and coconut flavours. This may be linked to the fact that oenologist Teófilo Reyes had worked for both wineries as a consultant, before he set up in business with his own bodega in 1994 – though he himself became only a minor star, while others dominated the star-studded scene. The 1985 Pesquera Gran Reserva is the Pétrus of Spain – anybody making such courageous comparison must either have a good lawyer, or preferably be one himself. This sentence marked, as it were, the international birth of the Ribera del Duero brand. In addition to Pesquera it was mainly the much smaller winery Bodega Ismael Arroyo that attracted attention for its  ValSotillo, which was earning high accolades repeatedly as a Gran Reserva, but these days has a much lower profile in the public eye. A mention of  Pérez Pascuas brings to an end the list of old stars that were around at the founding of the region.

 

It is interesting to note that, apart from Vega Sicilia, none of these producers today plays a part in the top league of the region, be it at national or international tastings. This is a result of a typically Spanish phenomenon, and which had foreseeable consequences, and yet has been almost totally ignored to date: two camps are involved in producing wine in Spain, and particularly so in Ribera del Duero; the grape farmers own the vineyards and sell the grapes to the bodegas, which produce the wine. In the boom phase of the 1990’s, with yields of only 17 to 19 hectolitres per hectare, there was a shortage of grape material, and the wine growers were the kings of the region. A kilogramme of grapes sold for up to 450 Pesetas, or 2,70 Euros. The only thing available for less than 200 Pesetas was the pomace used for distilling. The wine growers became rich – and later established their own wineries, which meant the older bodegas lost their source of supply for grapes, particularly for their top-rated wines. One of the wineries mentioned above pronounced to a surprised visitor that „We", and there was a great deal of Castilian pride in this we, „we are Bodegueros, and not grape farmers!" Wineries that used to make a fortune out of producing and selling close to half a million bottles each year are now producing a quarter of this quantity, and would be happy if they could even approximately achieve the prices they used to at the time.

The arrival of the New marks the golden years

 

Naturally, the establishment of a region is the most important activity for the region. However, in terms of quality, and everybody by now is agreed on this, a different event dictated the path the Ribera del Duero would be going in the future: the arrival of a blonde young man who in interviews always claims jokingly that he ran out of gas on the N-122, could not find a gas station and simply decided to stay. One may have one’s doubts about the accuracy of this story, but the result is very evident. Peter Sisseck was the first to break with the old assumption that only old vines could produce great wines. He was able to acquire the vineyards that today form the basis for the Hacienda Monasterio for next to nothing, simply because nobody wanted to plant vines on these limestone-rich slopes, and there was no alternative agricultural use for an area that has practically no deep topsoil. Nobody before then had spoken about reduced yields, about green harvesting, and nobody else built their business exclusively on processing their own grapes – even not Vega Sicilia, which still buys in a major part of its grapes from independent grape growers. At the same time as Pago de Carraovejas, Hacienda Monasterio introduced barrels of French oak, to counter the vanilla-dominated wines prevalent at the time, although the always diffident Dane would never express the procedure in these words.

Perhaps the secret of the best wines of Ribera del Duero: not a lot of soil, lots of limestone

What followed were the three golden years of Ribera del Duero. One accolade followed the other, dollars piled up, and the wineries were constantly sold out, thanks to the small harvests. Establishing a new bodega in Ribera del Duero became a hobby for nouveau riche Madrilenos, who could use the project as a conversation piece when bragging to their business partners. Rioja was taken totally unawares by this development. The region that had believed it had its permanent place in the sun suddenly had to cope with the fact it was now playing second fiddle, and had to adapt quickly. It was to take ten years before Rioja recovered from the shock. Today, fifteen years after the boom, a bottle of Rioja wine is again slightly more expensive, on average, than a bottle of wine from Ribera. At the time, both the prices and the volumes produced soared. When the relatively large vintage of 1996 – by the standards of the time – continued to sell very well, many wineries tightened the screws again in the following year – only to discover that this was one turn too many. The market collapsed. As a result of the extensive new vineyard plantings in the 1990’s, more and more wine was launched on to the market, and suddenly it was no longer a case of allocating a scarce product, now the product actually had to be actively sold – something many of the wineries had never learned to do, and were not equipped to do. The vineyard area had long since passed the 10.000 hectare level, and the Consejo kept on announcing ever new desired upper levels, but without success.

The big bang and the turnaround

 

The first projects started to collapse. Of any ten friends from Madrid who had set out to bring home red gold, six now became nervous and wanted their money back. The grape farmers, who generally had few contacts outside their own village, suddenly did not know where to market their wine. Prices collapsed, sometimes decreasing by more than 50 %, and export sales collapsed too. This development started off in Europe, particularly in Germany, where a new darling was vying for the public’s attention: Priorato. Soon after, exports to the USA also slumped, mainly because the value of the dollar kept on rising, and the wines were virtually no longer affordable. The number of wineries also broke through a barrier: in 1998 there were more than 100 wineries in Ribera del Duero.

Almost 100 years old- and still going strong. An innocuous hill on the outskirts of Peñafiel  is the foundation for one of the most elegant wines of the region

 

And then came Pingus! And with it a new change in fortune. The system of the garagiste bodega, with which Peter Sisseck was very familiar from his time in Pomerol, made its appearance, together with the idea of mini-vinification. Initially there was only Pago Santa Cruz. Following on behind Pingus came Pesus, Terreus, Malleolus, the whole generation of „-us“ wines. Everybody who felt he had a reputation to defend absolutely had to have one of these wines – even the Aurus in Rioja. Ribera had managed to climb back to the top of the quality pyramid, mainly because there were also some signs of weakness in Priorato, and Rioja was at this stage still in a coma. But all the “-us“ wines could not hide the fact that everything that glitters was no longer gold, some of it was simply fat.

Producers had gotten used to the fact that 50 million kilogrammes of grapes could be processed, one became used to the chemistry. Many of the vineyards are in locations where in the past only potatoes had been grown and, if truth be told, they should have stuck to this crop in some areas. And one had gotten used to the fact that large bodegas from other regions had come to Ribera del Duero. Real Sitio de Ventosilla, still the estate with the largest vineyard holding in the region, with around 500 hectares, suddenly had competition: J. García Carrión from Jumilla, Felix Solís from Valdepeñas, Federico Paternina and many more. Torres came, as did Freixenet and Codorniu. Rioja was represented too, headed by La Rioja Alta, Galician producers came, even bodegas from Rueda such as Palacio de Bornos dared to come over to the other side. The face of Ribera del Duero changed. Felix Solis built something resembling a spaceship in Olmedillo de Roa, with a capacity of eight million litres, and J. Garcia Carrión became the sales leader of the region, with sales of five million bottles annually, Today the ten largest estates control a quarter of the market, and a tough market it is too. Small bodegas without any reputation were offering their wines, some of which were not bad at all, to restaurants at a Euro per bottle, and if you bought three cases, the fourth one was free. That is not how one makes money.

Internationally, Ribera del Duero had stabilised again. The value of the dollar decreased, and exports increased again, including those to Germany, which today imports some 400.000 bottles annually, or slightly more – the statistics provided by the Consejo are unfortunately rather vague.

Ribera as an Avantgarde region

The region had decided not to follow the classical maturation-related classification system of Crianza, Reserva and Gran Reserva, and slowly another system has come to the fore. However, this is something Ribera has clearly copied from Rioja. When Miguel Ángel de Gregorio launched his first Allende on the market, and labelled it as a simple Vino de Cosecha, simply because he did not want to argue with the Consejo about the duration of barrel maturation, nobody had really taken cognisance of the Ribera region yet. It was only when wines such as Palomero, Neo Punta Esencia or Avan appeared on the market, and it became clear the wineries could hardly market their best wines as Joven, and all the others as Crianza or Reserva, that the system began to show fault lines. The rule, which has never made a lot of sense, that the duration of barrel maturation should determine the status of a wine, also collapsed in Ribera del Duero. The Priorato region had never introduced the system, and in the Toro region, which had in the meantime also become quite large, only a few traditional producers used the system.

The most densely planted vineyard in the whole of Ribera del Duero, with 5000 vines per hectare. Many blocks are still trained and pruned in this head-pruned style

While all these developments were taking place, the Ribera del Duero region continued to grow constantly, although at a slower pace. Whereas in the early years some 30 new bodegas were established annually, this figure is now down to five or six. Bodegas Aniversario, which quickly changed its name just prior to the winery’s entry into the D.O., carries the number 231, with more to come. The total vineyard area has exceeded the figure of  20.000 hectares, with only a quarter of the vineyards older than 30 years. At the same time, mechanisation and industrialisation have proceeded apace. Many of the vineyards are now irrigated, because the type of wine made from the grapes can also be made when you are producing 7.000 kilogrammes per hectare. However, one must also point out that given an average 55% yield after pressing, this yield corresponds to a production of slightly less than 40 hectolitres per hectare – in Burgundy, that would be acceptable for a Grand Cru, and in Bordeaux there are wines with a similar yield selling at 800 Euros per bottle retail. As elsewhere in Spain, the concept of organic winemaking is not yet a major force in Ribera del Duero. There are currently three organic bodegas in Ribera del Duero, and certainly some of the older folks still think along organic lines, as that is basically what they grew up with.

 

Where will Ribera del Duero stand when it celebrates its 50th birthday?

As I was privileged to actively experience 13 of the last 25 years in Ribera myself, I am going to venture a look into the future: Ribera will not grow significantly in total area. There are practically no more opportunities of creating large, contiguous vineyard areas, a definite prerequisite for major investments by key players both in Spain and internationally. The number of bodegas will grow slowly. However, the structure is set to change. The trend towards an increasing number of small and even tiny bodegas, some of which are producing no more than 8000 bottles annually is likely to continue, a trend that bodes well for attention to quality. At the same time, the degree of concentration of the major players is also likely to increase, which will help achieve market penetration in supermarkets, a segment of the trade in which Ribera del Duero is so far practically non-existent. The medium-sized producers, all the wineries that are currently producing around 200.000 to 500.000 bottles of wine annually, will be facing the toughest challenges. Many wineries will probably be bought up by major groups. Overall, the quality of the wines is likely to improve. Even now, there are very few really faulty wines. The change, planned for the next few years, which will see the D.O. being classified as a D.O.Ca., will automatically lead to more stringent controls, which will improve quality. And producers will gain knowledge and experience, particularly with regard to the maturation potential of the wines. Apart from Vega Sicilia, which holds a special position for many reasons, there are hardly any wines in existence that are really mature. It remains to be seen whether Ribera del Duero wines actually do age as well as everybody has always assumed. The oldest ValSotillo is just 22 years old, and the oldest Janus Gran Reserva not much older.

In the quality wine sector, which is expected to continue to make up around 20% of production in future, one will continue to discuss and experiment with barrel sizes, new versus used oak, cement tanks, oak or stainless steel for fermentation, the duration of barrel ageing, perhaps with different training and pruning systems and new grape varieties. Ribera del Duero is the most southerly region of the so-called septentrional viticulture. That means there are a lot of option, and, after all, Ribera del Duero is still young, the region is only just starting to grow up into adulthood.