Growing wine is like raising a child: you muddle around for years to the best of your ability and in the end you don’t know what the outcome will be.
Photo: New Visions Film Distribution
You can recognize a good wine immediately, regardless of its price. That’s what someone who should know says, a winemaker from La Rioja, the oldest (since Roman times) and northernmost wine-growing region in Spain. Nineteen thousand winemakers work here – in family businesses, cooperatives and large companies – to produce Rioja wine.
Because wine is an extremely labor-intensive product. The path from the cultivation of the vines through the grape harvest, fermentation, barrel aging to bottle maturity seems long – and risky. In “The Land of a Thousand Wines” José Luis López-Linares (who has already made films about Francisco de Goya and Hieronymus Bosch) takes a journey through La Rioja, through which the Ebro flows and – or so it is said – in which no wine corresponds equal to others. If there is no bad harvest, because wine is a very special juice, especially a very sensitive one.
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This is not only due to the weather, but also to pests such as the infamous phylloxera, which destroyed three quarters of Europe’s grape vines at the end of the 19th century. Chemistry does not help against this pest, only the use of resistant roots that come from the country of origin of the phylloxera. Today, 85 percent of European wine grows from American roots!
José Luis-Linares not only directed “The Land of a Thousand Wines,” but also wrote the screenplay and directed the camera. In his entirely original filmic journey through La Rioja, he combines the cultural-historical dimension of the subject of wine with the everyday practical complications of its production. Sometimes it seems like an oversized advertising clip with the motto: Our wine is the best, buy our wine, which is still far too cheap, which has to change quickly!
Fortunately, that’s just one facet, there are also others, especially the portraits of individual winemakers who talk about why they have linked their lives to wine, often already in the umpteenth generation. When you hear them musing about wine, you can feel the passion. Making wine is, on the one hand, hard work that lasts all year round – and on the other hand, it is an art in which the result, the finished wine, is as highly individual as the person who created it. Does the wine ultimately resemble the winemaker it comes from more closely than the wine from the neighboring plot? In fact, two parcels are often worlds apart.
Time is inherent in wine, which makes it – unlike beer – a philosophical drink. Because the grapes store the hours of sunshine in a year, as well as the amount of precipitation – this makes each vintage unique. Very good wines take a lot of time to mature, first in steel or concrete tanks, then in oak barrels (French or American oak, either new or used), then in the bottle. It can easily take five to eight years before a Reserva or Grand Reserva goes on sale. And who would want to counteract this slow pace of maturation by hastily drinking it? Good wine teaches you to enjoy it slowly, developing your own spirit in which tradition and longing for the future mix.
In Rioja, limestone soils predominate, which makes them unusable for agriculture, but wine likes these soils, which means that the grapes grow slowly and remain small. But that’s why the taste is so much more intense. In addition, very different winds blow here during the year: cold ones from the Atlantic, but also warm ones from the Mediterranean. This climatic “stress” keeps the vines healthy. Many here are now sixty or even eighty years old. According to winemakers, the older a vine, the better the wine. The young vines, just planted, still have a long way to go.
The word “location” comes up again and again. It seems to be a magic word. “Some locations are simply unique.” The Rioja wines want to move away from labeling that is based solely on the length of time the wine is aged in barrels: Crianza, Reserva and Grand Reserva. Many winemakers are now starting to market their wines based on location – following their big rival from France, Bordeaux. Some locations there are already fetching astronomical prices. How do these come about? As with works of modern art, this is often pure speculation, an attribution supported by wine critics and the sommeliers of top restaurants. Some bottles cost several thousand euros.
And if it’s corked? Who is responsible for the quality of a natural product like wine? As a passionate red wine drinker, I can say from my own experience that if you are looking for a top wine for special occasions beyond the big expensive brands, you will definitely find it – assuming you have some knowledge – for around thirty euros. Everything about that falls into the category of siphoning off excessive purchasing power.
The fact that wine and poetry belong together suggests that both have a stimulating effect on the mind and senses. But be careful, anyone who believes they can stimulate themselves with wine is often just lowering their own critical standards. Thomas Mann once confessed to having “doped” some of Wein’s unpopular commissioned works – they did not stand up to later critical revision. The intoxication stimulates the imagination but lowers judgment.
One could talk for a long time about the “tannins”, the “body” and the “finish” of a wine – and the wine enthusiasts in this film do too. Also about the grape varieties that are preferred here in La Rioja. Above all the all-rounder Tempranillo, which develops small grapes that ripen quickly, but also Garnacha and the traditional, particularly expressive but susceptible to pests Mazuelo.
But talking about wines, as we see it, seems to be a whole poetic profession in its own right. Marketing talent alone is not enough and brittle references to the presence or absence of a “texture” provide little insight. Something of a lyricist must have been lost on every sommelier. An often extremely expensive wine is not just praised by this person, but also written about. Then a wine has the character of bitter apricot with a hint of coffee on a dark cherry background in a slightly leathery context, the whole thing based on Mediterranean opulence, contrasted by ancient Antique austerity. You could fill entire volumes of poetry with the paradoxes of wine!
So it’s a bit surprising to see one of the powerful wine critics sitting in a small bodega looking rather bored and haughty and being served the house’s three top wines by the frightened winemakers. In the first two he says nothing at all, which brings a sweat to the winemaker couple’s foreheads, but in the third he manages to utter a curt “schick”. Is this the end of all wine poetry? After all, sales are assured for this wine.
The problem of talking about wine is as old as wine itself. Hermann Hesse reports in a short text about the attempt to write a wine guide with friends. They had winemakers send them plenty of wine samples and then happily drank them in copious quantities. But how to describe him? According to Hesse, some people saw all sorts of colors while drinking, others even heard sounds. How to turn this into text? Then some developed an addiction to ever larger quantities, others reacted allergically to every new sip – and the wine guide remained unwritten. The wine is always both: challengingly divine and devilish at the same time.
“The Land of a Thousand Wines”, Spain 2023. Director and screenplay: José Luis López-Linares. 87 minutes
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