Pour Man: In Spain, a rugged region produces royal wines

I’m thinking of a place with scorching hot summers, brutal freezing winters, harsh winds, huge temperature shifts in a single day, a specially named “mile” of a particular road rife with exquisite consumerables, a river that cuts the whole place in half, separating north from south, and more than 100,000 native Spanish speakers.

No, not Chicago. It’s called Ribera del Duero (“Banks of the Duero” River), and it’s a rugged wine region in Spain, about 90 miles north of Madrid. In this sparsely populated, high-altitude region within Castile and Leon, green hills and prairies come alive in spring and turn gray and dry when the summer sun bakes.

Red wine is king in Ribera del Duero, and the majority of it is made from Tempranillo, the grape known in Spain as Tinto Fino or Tinta del Pais.

Ribera del Duero’s wines, which offer aromas and flavors ranging from dark fruits and licorice to toast and wood, are classified according to how long they have been aged and how long that process involved aging in oak barrels. Joven, or “young” wines, have spent little or no time in oak (the subcategory for an oaked Joven is Roble) and are bottled shortly after harvest. Think of them as Ribera del Duero’s version of Beaujolais Nouveau.

Crianza is the next category, followed by Reserva and, finally, Gran Reserva, which spends two years in oak barrels and another three years in bottles before being released. In rare cases where a winemaker strays from the strict aging formulas set forth by the region, or uses additional sanctioned grapes (including Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec or Garnacha Tinta, Spain’s version of Grenache), the wines are classified as Cosecha.

Wines have been made in this area of north-central Spain for centuries, but as an official wine region Ribera del Duero is less than 30 years old. A few of the most revered wines in Spain are made in Ribera del Duero, some in wineries dotting a two-lane rural highway known as the “Golden Mile.”

This is where the storied Vega-Sicilia has been making wine for nearly 150 years and where, in the 1970s, it put Ribera del Duero on the map with its rarified “Unico” wine – made only in years when the grapes are exceptional. A short time later, Alejandro Fernandez made his first “Tinto Pesquera” and the legend of Ribera del Duero gained momentum.

Pesquera is made in a modern facility today – by Eva Fernandez, Alejandro’s fourth and youngest daughter – but the man made his first 10 vintages using a stone and wooden wine press built in the 16th century.

Eva took over in 1991. She is not alone. Forty of the approximately 200 winemakers in Ribera del Duero are women. It is an old place, with old ways, but it also is evolving.

Peter Sisseck, a Dane who spent significant time in Bordeaux as a youngster and owns a winery there today, came to Ribera del Duero because he saw opportunity.

“It’s a place with some great dirt and a classic grape that had not been fully exploited, and it’s still not,” he says.

Ribera del Duero wines keep getting better and more people are coming to know this region that has often been overshadowed by its more famous neighbor, the Rioja region, another bastion of Tempranillo.

“Thirty years ago we were nothing,” says Augustin Alonso Gonzalez, the region’s technical director. “Now we’re one of the most renowned regions in Spain with Rioja.”

Sisseck and his wine drew attention when, in 1996, he took a small amount of his first vintage to Bordeaux and sold it all within a week. The wine also got great reviews from the world’s leading wine critics, and Dominio de Pingus was on its way. Then in 1997, tragedy turned into triumph.

A ship loaded with Pingus wine and bound for the United States sank. Instant cult classic. The wine is not indicative of Ribera del Duero as a whole, but it is one of the wines that has upped the region’s mystique. There are the old classics, there is Pingus and there are younger upstarts such as Neo, which has a cult appeal of its own. Neo’s owners produce the music festival Sonorama and had a recording studio built in their winery. They even named one of their wines “Disco.”

In a place as old and traditional as Spain, one is thankful for the time-tested ways but also relieved to know that things are moving forward and getting better: the wines – especially the wines – but also the food, which hardly has room for improvement, the people (again, stellar) and the traditions.

The weather? Not so much. Just like Chicago.