Hi, I'm Mark Middlebrook, I'm here in the Paul Marcus Wines Warehouse, and in this segment I'm going to talk about traditional versus modern Riojas. And I have an example of each here fortunately. In Rioja is again a very classic wine region where they've been making wine for quite a long time, but there's been a lot of ferment, excuse the pun, recently in the past couple of decades about how to make wine there and what style of wine to make. And you have the kind of staunch traditionalists like this producer Lopez de Heredia, as well as some really wonderful modern winemakers like this one Valsacro, and there are many other examples of each, these are just the two I have on hand right now. The traditionalists will generally use American Oak Barrels and age the wines quite a long time in them, this is a 1987, I'm not sure how long it spent in the barrel, but this came over here to Oakland, California from the winery probably within the last year, so it's been cooling its heels in Rioja for quite a long time, and a long part of that time was in barrel. The modernists tend to prefer to use French oak Barrels instead of American oak, often they will use shorter fermentation times and a little bit shorter barrel aging times. This particular producer as I mentioned is Valsacro. And another unusual thing about this particular bottling is it's mostly garnache, mostly garnache, whereas this is mostly tempranillo, the more traditional grape variety in Rioja in northern Spain. I love to drink them both, they just have very different character and styles. These have a little bit more spiciness, often a little lighter color, a little more earthy flavor, and a real kind of beautiful, elegant lighter perfume, the aromas of these wines to me are just absolutely beguiling, and quite unique, nothing to me smells quite like an old style Rioja. The newer style Riojas tend to be a little more upfront fruit, a little richer, both in terms of the color of the wine when you look at in the glass, and richer flavors, richer kind of fruit flavors. That doesn't mean they're necessarily less complex, but you get a little bit more density to the palette feel of the wine. Depending on what you're eating or your mood you might choose one or the other, some people do prefer one style to the other, but as I mentioned, I find both of them fun to drink, and as a wine friend once told me, happiness is being ticklish in more than one place, and both of these things tickle me a lot.
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