Telmo Rodríguez

Determined to create a new conversation around Rioja, the prolific and world-renowned winemaker teamed up with six of his growers to make a range in which each wine is imbued with a distinct sense of its place of origin

- RICHARD WOODARD

Telmo Rodríguez, you sense, doesn’t like to be labelled or pigeonholed. In London to present his latest range of wines – a fascinating set of single-origin Riojas – he immediately takes issue with being introduced to a group of sommeliers as a ‘driving winemaker’.

‘No, no, no, please, I hate that,’ he protests. ‘I’m not a “driving winemaker”, and I don’t make wine “all over Spain”. I haven’t even been all around Spain because it’s just way too big… Or they call me “enfant terrible”, and I’m 60 years old! It doesn’t make sense to me at all.’

Why do people say such things about one of Spain’s most dynamic contemporary winemakers? As with most clichés, a germ of truth lies within. Rodríguez has made wine in a lot of different Spanish locations – more than 12, at a conservative estimate – and that has inevitably involved quite a bit of time on the autopista.

As for enfant terrible… well, Rodríguez has a habit of speaking his mind: ‘The Rioja business is to produce as much as you can, as cheaply as you can… We want to create a red line between industrial Rioja and human-scale Rioja.

‘The Rioja model of producing 400 million bottles in three categories [age-based crianza, reserva and gran reserva] is dead. No one in fine wine can understand an appellation like that. Imagine Bordeaux with three age classifications…’

EARLY YEARS