Video: Rioja Blanca Wines

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Using the Viura grape, Rioja Blanca wine has clean body that pairs well with seafood and vegetables dishes. Learn more about Rioja Blanca wines from a professional sommelier in this free video.

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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 Rioja Blanco, or white Rioja. Generally, white wine in Rioja is made principally from the grape variety called Viura, there's some other things that they use and blend in many of the wines, but typically that's their calling card for whites. Viura is a great variety that tends to give a wine with a little more body and texture than you might get say from Sauvignon Blanc or Grunau Valtliner, some of those lighter-bodied wines. In Rioja, Viura is made into a wine that, in kind of two different ways. Wine like this, this is stock 2007 Rioja Blanco is made in a fairly modern style, probably mostly stainless steel tanks and the idea there is to emphasize the freshness of the wine. Get a wine that has that texture and body of Viura but with a real kind of clean character to it, good as an aperitif, good with lighter to medium bodied seafood dishes, vegetables, things like that. A fairly easy going type of white wine, something that a Chardonnay drinker would probably enjoy, flavors are different but it has that weight. The other style of white Rioja is, again a more old-fashioned style, that's been made for quite a while, certainly decades, maybe hundreds of years. And that is to take the wine and put it in oak barrels for a fairly long time. And with that you get a typically a richer more complex wine, a little more subtle flavors, a little less fruity, a little darker complexion both to the color of the wine and the flavors. Those kinds of wines certainly parallel with fuller-bodied fish dishes and so on, but I like to just drink with them cheese or on their own as a kind of special course.