Artuke ‘La Condenada’ Rioja 2021

Why is this Wine so Yummy?

The Condemned’ refers to the state in which Arturo found the vineyard – completely abandoned by the previous owner who’d grown too old to care for it yet resolutely refused to sell to anyone from outside the area. The Miguel family however were considered locals which allowed Arturo to buy the vineyard three years after it had last been pruned or ploughed. It sits on a steep gradient around 650m with almost no top soil above the town of Banos de Ebro.

For the first time, a red from the DOC Rioja appears with 100 points in the Atkin report. It is “2020 La Condenada”, from the Artuke Winery in Baños de Ebro.

About

Artuke’s vineyards stretch from the base of the Cantabrian Mountains to the Ebro River, all located within a thin north-south running strip through the subregion of Rioja Alavesa. It is a small, family owned winery headed by brothers Arturo and Kike de Miguel Blanco based from their home town, Baños de Ebro, where the Miguel Blanco family has lived and farmed for five generations. That narrow strip of land within the enormous region that is the official D.O. of Rioja is their historical homeland – vineyards added to the family collection over generations only if they are within a few kilometers of Baños. Whilst the family’s roots in the Rioja wine industry go deep, Arturo and Kike are only the second generation to be considered winemakers; before that the family were purely farmers who sold grapes on to the big houses of Haro.

The first steps were taken by Arturo and Kike’s father, who built a modest winery and began making simple joven style Rioja, mostly sold on to be re-labeled by another bigger brand. But under the leadership of the current generation, Artuke has leapt from modest beginnings to the very top of Rioja hierarchy.

Artuke has seen one of the best progressions in Rioja in the last few years and is one of the finest young family wineries in the region. They have 30 hectares planted between 1920 and 2013 in their village, Baños De Ebro and Ábalos, San Vicente de La Sonsierra, Samaniego and Villabuena de Álava

Louis Gutiérrez

In the Vineyard

Farming here is all by hand, fully organic with some biodynamic treatments. It’s sensitive agriculture from practitioners who very much see themselves as custodians of land and vineyard that they expect to leave to future generations. The vineyards that the brothers have inherited or later acquired themselves show the full range of terroir along that narrow band. From from flat alluvial plains on fertile soils that line the Ebro River; all of which become the juicy, quaffable ‘Artuke Tempranillo’ through to the extreme sites of Escolladero and Condenada where soil is almost entirely absent and vines fight their way straight into the limestone bedrock. In response to this gradient of sites the winery is structured in a very Burgundian model; lower lying more productive sites into a basic Tempranillo, a cluster of promising sites in the village of Abalos gives the village wine ‘Pies Negros.’* Then the four ‘Crus’ are graded again by quality of site – giving the two ‘Grand Cru’ and ‘Premier Cru’ cuvees.

The family completed soil studies on 32 different plots around the villages of Baños de Ebros, Abalos, and San Vicente and employed organic and sustainable farming practices at each. Eschewing the barrel aging requirements of the Rioja classification system, and often employing neutral oak, they seek instead to give each plot the treatment that will translate its unique terroir most precisely.

The de Miguel brothers, whose names combine to form Artuke, typically make three single-vineyard wines from old-vine sites, along with village wines that combine grapes from carefully selected plots. Yet they’re always looking for new, fascinating vineyards—especially ones with old vines in need of revitalization.

Artuke’s 32 sites might be clustered around the same villages, but they boast subtle climatic and soil differences

In the Winery

Over the years the wines have developed a strong stylistic stamp; lithe, smokey minerality, very fine tannin without the use of any new oak. If there’s a world that sums up the collection over the last five or six vintages it would be ‘Precise.’ Quite simply the wines being produced here are as seductive and stimulating as anything ‘Modern Rioja’ has bottled yet – and they couldn’t have come from a more humble or grounded pair of practitioners.

Where in the World is Artuke Bodegas y Vinedos?

Artuke’s vineyards based in the old sub-region Alavesa.

There is a growing push to better recognise quality terroir by define the:

1. Quality soils in Rioja at a macro level, equivalent to Appellation Bourgogne in Burgundy;
2. The individual villages or Pueblo of Rioja equivalent to a village in Burgundy like Gevrey-Chambertin or Chassagne-Montrachet; and
3. The special places (like lieu dit in Burgundy) & individual vineyards within the villages.

Only time will tell how this unfolds. In the meantime we’ll be including information on all of the wines we list from Rioja.

The area is vast with over 60,000Ha of vines planted. As Scott Wasley puts it, it’s the equivalent of using South East Australia to classify the wines NSW, Victora, SA and Tasmania. In the flyover below at the 20sec mark you’ll see a high level geological map of general soil types, it’s clear they run perpendicular to the general sub-region orientation along a number of rivers, valleys and sub-plains. The fact that I’ve mentioned both the split in soil types, and, significant geological changes if enough for any vigneron worth their salt to call for a more detailed differentiation between key viticultural areas of Rioja. Politics, corruption and a bias toward bland mass-produced wines the adversaries of progress on mapping the region. Without more appropriate classification of vineyards we have to rely on the reputation of quality producer and their track record in the glass. Perhaps not a bad thing for an individual wine. Not great for the reputation of a region as a whole.

Although not an official classification the map below would be a start to delineating between different areas of Rioja based on the Valleys within it. You can clearly see the rivers running through each of the valleys.

General in nature the soil map below offers some guidance on the geology of Rioja.