Video: About the Rioja Wine Region

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The La Rioja region in northern Spain has over 14,000 vineyards. Learn more about the La Rioja wine region from a professional sommelier in this free video about Spanish wines.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Mark Middlebrook and I'm here in the Paul Marcus Wines warehouse and in this segment, I'm going to talk about the rioja regions and an overview of its wines. Rioja is an area in north central Spain, up here. It’s northeast of Madrid and south of Bilbao and the Bass country. In that region we find white wine, rose' and lots and lots of red wine. The whites are often fairly full bodied but clean and crisp, most of them, good with lots of kinds of kind of fully bodied fish and those kinds of dishes. The rose', this is an unusual rose'. It’s an older one but many of the roses that come from rioja are crisp and clean, maybe a little bit like the southern French roses you might have had with a little more body to them. And then the reds, kind of the glory of rioja and you find very traditional wines like this one from Lopez de Heredia. They're very spicy, gamy, sometimes earthy sorts of flavors as well as more modern ones like the Vemes de Ganuza which have a little more lush fruit to them, a little darker complexion both to the color of the wine and the attach of the fruit. Rioja is a really fun region to drink wine from because there's a great variety of them as I mentioned different styles from very traditional, very modern as well as different price ranges, fairly inexpensive wines you can drink every day with dinner and lunch as well as quite profound wines that are elegant and often very expensive in some of the best wines that come from Spain or indeed Europe.