Photograph by Kevin J. Miyazaki
What would a caveman winery look like? This is a question I never thought to ask—until I found myself standing by a winemaking vat carved from a boulder the size of a two-story house. I was at the ruins of a vast, ancient sandstone winery in Rioja, in the part of northern Spain that’s within sight of France and across the water from England. At the top of the boulder was the vat, the pool, the place where ancient grape harvesters would dump their grapes. Once the grapes were in there, the cavemen—and cavewomen! maybe cave kids!—would presumably step on the grapes, letting the juice flow down a sluice to a smaller pool below. Then, who knows? Maybe the juice fermented for a while out in the open air. Perhaps the cavepeople brought in different grape varieties when they became ripe. Perhaps they had cavepeople wine bars where they drank the finished wine from scallop shells or animal skins. We modern people have a lot of clichés in our minds about cavemen, and we easily imagine them throwing spears at various large animals. But sitting down for a nice glass of wine? It takes standing in a caveman winery to realize our failure of imagination.
I had just left a high mountain Tempranillo vineyard in Rioja Baja, the easternmost chunk of the Rioja’s three districts, to experience a wine area that most Americans know only from wine lists. This is where Spain’s greatest reds come from, as well as a new crop of traditional whites. Yet when I stood in the lichen-streaked remains of this ancient winery, staring at a line of red cliffs in the distance, like one-half of a shorter Grand Canyon, every thought I had of French oak barrels and the usual wine critic stuff fled my mind. The sheer cliff faces with their black cave doors look for all the world like the American Southwest, like the prehistoric cliff dwellings of Arizona, Utah or New Mexico.
In fact, there’s a lot in this part of Spain that makes you feel as if you’re in the States. Everywhere you look are cowboys, cowboy hats, cattle. My first impression on seeing a Spanish square filled with men who looked like Texans: The Spanish around here love American cowboy culture! Then I turned on my thinking brain: American cowboy culture originated in Spain, didn’t it? Yes, after the Spanish conquistadors laid the groundwork, the American Southwest was the land of vaqueros, cowboys who brought to the New World Spanish equestrian and cattle-ranching techniques perfected on the dry Iberian Peninsula of their birth. This part of Rioja is full of classic equestrian Spanish ranching culture—it’s where American buckaroos come from. The word buckaroo is even said to be a derivative of vaquero, an idea that seems far-fetched until you’re up among the red cliffs of Rioja, and you see cows wandering through the dry clouds of thyme and locals discussing how their steak is the best on earth (it might be). And with the steak, of course, inky local wine. The cavemen drank wine, the cowboys drink wine—but I’d never been in wine country like this.
The concept of wine country is pretty new, comparatively. Bordeaux in France only came into prominence in the mid-17th century, when Dutch engineers figured out how to drain its swamp. Napa Valley and Sonoma were planted with wine grapes about 200 years later, around the same time as the Gold Rush. While Rioja has all the modern tourism conveniences—modern tasting rooms, multilingual cellar guides and an unforgettable food scene, its depth of wine history and wine culture can’t be found anywhere else on earth.
Quel, for example, is a tiny Rioja village among the red cliffs. Here, they grow grapes on the high plateaus and cart them to the sheer cliffs on the edges of the plateau that drop off to rivers below. There, at the cliffs’ edges, are structures that look like tiny garden sheds. Each shed is poised over a tunnel that has been drilled in the stone, leading to caves below. The caves are real winemaking caves, some enormous but all cool and carved from the living rock face. Families own the caves and throw their grapes down the chutes to make the wine, using the cave as a sort of getaway from the main house. As British families might have a garden folly or portico to retreat to on hot days, Spanish families in Quel might have a cave. I got to see the cave owned by the Pérez Cuevas family, which owns the Ontañón winery; the grapes fall down the chute into a sort of dumbwaiter reception area (which turned out to be a fermentation tank) and can be transferred then to a stone vat, cut from the living cave. The family had all the grandchildren jump on the grapes to make a test batch in the old ways, and we stood in the cave watching the video they posted on YouTube. The ancient cave Wi-Fi was not bad at all.
Back in the town of Logroño, I saw better preserved and smaller, though still ancient, winemaking tools, like a third-century winepress. Yet with wineries should come tourists, and Rioja had some of the first of those, too. Rioja tourism really took off in the ninth century, when the tomb of the apostle St. James was discovered in Galicia, in northwestern Spain, which had been under Moorish control. The Cathedral Santiago de Compostela was built to honor James (the son of Mary’s supposed sister, Salome), and it quickly became a holy site on par with Jerusalem and Rome. A former Roman trade route from France became the Camino, the Way of St. James. In medieval times, the church declared that walking the Camino qualified a believer for an “indulgence,” an elimination of the temporal punishment someone had to undergo for their sins. A few hundred thousand people still walk the Camino every year, for it is one of the most sacred routes in Christendom. More than 250,000 people got their “credencial,” a sort of pilgrim passport, filled up in 2015, but more come in jubilee years, when St. James’ Day falls on a Sunday. (The next jubilee year is 2021.)
The scallop shell is the symbol of St. James, and if you look around Logroño, you’ll see scallop shells everywhere to mark the route and special sites, such as the locations of miracles, churches, lodgings or historical sites of special interest to the devout. Contemporary nonpilgrims use the Camino as a bird watching, hiking or biking trail, though the whole route from France to Galicia is about 500 miles, making it something like Europe’s much flatter, more gourmet-focused Appalachian or Pacific Crest trail. (There’s even a company that will rent you a mountain bike in Logroño and pick it up from you 12 days later in Galicia.) A possible effect of having a couple of thousand hungry tourists visit Logroño every day since the ninth century? It is a fantastic food and wine city.
Logroño is world famous for its tapas, here called pinchos. Most people go here for pinchos, then there, hitting maybe half a dozen spots over a few hours and getting a little glass of beer, wine or sidra (cider) at every stop. However, you really should get a steak, specifically at El Rincón de Alberto, a tapas bar and sit-down restaurant run by the chef Alberto Andrés Contreras. He has deep connections to local farmers and can get the very unusual and hotly prized beef from Galician Blond grass-pasture-fed dairy cattle. Seared over wood, these Galician steaks are staggering, lush and exquisite, with winey, berry depths and thunderous resonance. I tried this steak beside a 2005 Ontañón Rioja Reserva, a well-knit wine that’s all blackberry, earth and black pepper. It was a combination to make you see why people have been thinking this is a good idea since before the time of modern man.
Much later, I went out for a dinner most Americans would barely recognize as dinner: The center of Logroño, especially the main street Calle Laurel and the ones near it, turns into a hive of folks walking from tiny restaurant to tiny restaurant, sampling tiny plate after tiny plate, having little glasses of wine, beer or sidra as they go. Imagine a cocktail party that’s the whole city; imagine a state fair where much of the food is true brag-worthy gastronomy; that’s Logroño. Some of the highlights: Big plates of sautéed wild mushrooms with soft eggs; salads of high-quality canned mackerel, sweet onions and nearly black-skinned dark tomatoes; a version of a Spanish tortilla that was creamy with just-set custardy eggs, weighty with crushed potatoes and piquant with tangy peppers.
As I hoisted a glass in cheers and saw Logroño through the moonlight, I wondered: Did this wine have anything in common with the kind that cavemen drank when European cave lions roamed Spain? (Possibly; cave lions died out in Europe about 14,000 years ago.) Would this plate of eggy tortilla be recognizable to medieval pilgrims? (Possibly; omelets were already popular in ancient Roman times.) One thing is for sure: If a caveman from that ancient winery in the hills of Rioja Baja suddenly materialized in Logroño, he would have a rip-roaringly delicious night and wine he may just recognize, at least a bit, from a world gone by that’s right here for the finding.