|
|||||||||||
Spain in the News |
|||||||||||
|
From The Wine Spectator: November 30, 2004 An Excerpt From: "Spain's New Wave of Whites"The idiosyncratic Emilio Rojo works out of a glorified Quonset hut, deliberately turning his back on modernity. With his bristly mustache and black baseball cap, he is instantly recognizable in wine circles throughout Spain, appearing in magazine photos and attending symposiums. And yet, many Spanish consumers have never actually seen his wine. Even in his most fecund years, his production is modest by any standard. "Welcome to my kiosk," he says, opening the door to the two-room, concrete shed that serves as his facility. "This is my labeling area," he says, motioning toward a piece of cardboard that has been laid atop a plastic crate. A telecommunications engineer until 1982, Rojo quit, spent a year in London, and then three more "relaxing and doing nothing" in Leiro. He took over the winery from his father in 1987 and changed its concept from bulk wines to tiny quantities of the highest quality. Now 51, he makes a living at it, barely. His wines sell for about $35 a bottle in stores in the United States, startlingly expensive for a Spanish white - but even before expenses, his revenue is meager. It comes as little surprise that no bottles remain for anyone to taste on site. Instead, Rojo offers visitors refreshment straight from a stainless steel tank. A field blend of five local grapes - Treixadura, Loureiro, Lado, Albariño and Torrontés - the wine will remain unfiltered, and a quarter of the 5,000-odd liters will be aged in new oak before the final blend is made. The result, year after year, is a complex and delicate wine that can be found on the wine lists of some of Spain's best restaurants, including Michelin three-stars El Bulli, Arzak and Can Fabes, and in the United States, which gets an allotment of 50 cases annually. Despite his critical success, or perhaps because of it, Rojo has no interest in planting new vines, not even on the patch of empty land that sits above his terraced vineyard. "My goal is to make less wine, not more," he says. "I'd rather have a vineyard with five vines than 5,000." Believe it or not, he has exactly that: a row of five lonely vines on a tiny strip of soil that his wife's parents used to own. Its existence expresses his philosophy better than any mission statement or marketing brochure ever could. But Rojo's scale of production fits Galicia. These aren't appellations suited for large-scale winemaking. |
TravelingStaying HomeVisit a Winery |
||||||||||
