Rioja producers reinforce their commitment to concrete
Once considered a cheap alternative to oak, some producers in Rioja are falling back in love with concrete vessels. Louis Thomas reports from Spain.
When it comes to winemaking vessels, concrete is perhaps the overlooked middle child – not as romantic and rustic as oak, not as sleek and precise as steel. In many corners of the wine world it is often seen as a hangover from post-war frugality, an affordable medium for fermentation and maturation that was functional but flawed.
However, as is usually the case with fashion, the historic ways garner new fans. One region where concrete’s comeback is particularly noticeable is in the Spanish wine powerhouse of Rioja.
The stereotype of old school Rioja is one of a big wine supercharged with American oak, and all the vanilla and coconut that comes with that. The production regulations for the DOCa stipulate that for a wine to be classified as Crianza, for example, it must age for at least one year in 225 litre oak barrels while for Gran Reserva reds it is two years (six months for white and rosé expressions).
However, it is a testament to the diversity of Rioja as a region that these styles, while familiar to most consumers, are not the be-all and end-all.
Ramón Bilbao
Among the proponents of concrete today is Rosana Lisa, Ramón Bilbao’s director of wine innovation.
During a trip to the Ramón Bilbao winery in Haro, in the west of La Rioja, last week, Lisa told the drinks business why she thinks that concrete is falling back into favour with winemakers.
“We experimented with stainless steel, concrete and oak. All have positive aspects,” she explained. “Steel is a very pure material and easy when it comes to temperature management with a cooling jacket – very importantly, it’s easy to clean. Oak is very useful in winemaking, but adds its own flavour to the wine, depending on origin, level of toasting, volume, but it is good for micro-oxygenation as it’s a porous material, allowing oxygen to enter during ageing, stabilising the colour and softening the tannins, making it more drinkable. Concrete was very big for cooperatives in the 60s and 70s, but always covered in epoxy to stop heavy metals leaching in. Epoxy also made the cleaning process easier.”
“When we decided to use concrete, we experimented with different shapes, Italian versus French, epoxy versus raw concrete,” continued Lisa. “We studied many aspects: heavy metals, calcium, oxygenation. After that we decided it had to be from Italy, had to be in this more-cuboid shape rather than egg for longevity, and the inside must be raw, as it gave an honest, pure flavour linked to the vineyard.”
“Concrete is a cross between stainless steel and oak. It’s very honest, but it gives roundness,” she added, suggesting that the concrete the winery uses adds around 50% of the oxygen as an oak barrel, approximately 6 grams per litre as opposed to 12.
Raw concrete is not without its disadvantages, of course.
“It’s hard to clean as the material is rough inside, so we use high pressure water, whereas for barrels we use steam. We can’t use different temperatures when cleaning concrete otherwise it will crack, so we fill it with water, recycled from vat to vat. After fermentation it is purple, so we keep water in for two-to-three days, drain it, and people go in and scrub it.”
One key advantage of concrete is that it holds temperatures very well, though Ramón Bilbao’s new concrete vats are equipped with a metal concrete circulation system to give some degree of temperature regulation. However, the thermal inertia of concrete as a material has forced a change in post-harvest fruit management.
Ramón Bilbao used to store its grapes prior to crushing at around 2-3°C to preserve freshness, but it was found that once the must was transferred to concrete, it stayed too cold, inhibiting extraction. Today the picked berries are kept at 6°C.
Despite these teething troubles, the numbers speak for themselves. With the first 21st century tests of concrete being undertaken in 2013, in 2015 four vessels were installed. By the end of the following year, when the refurbishment of the winery was completed, some 48 concrete tanks had been installed, joining the roster of 1960s-era epoxy-lined tanks which are now just used for storage.
Ramón Bilbao uses concrete in the winemaking at different price points within its portfolio, from the lower-alcohol, 11% ABV Early Harvest label, consisting of a rosé (Tempranillo Blanco and Garnacha fermented and aged in concrete) and a white (Verdejo fermented in steel and then aged in concrete), up to its single-vineyard Lalomba range. Indeed, concrete is so instrumental in the creation of the latter that the label was designed to evoke the colour, shape and texture of a concrete tank.
Viña Salceda
If Ramón Bilbao’s winery is a hyper-modern combination of visitor centre, restaurant and, of course, winemaking facility, then Viña Salceda, overlooking the Ebro river which divides the Basque Country from La Rioja, seems like a smaller, more traditional affair, despite the producer being 45 years Ramón Bilbao’s junior.
Viña Salceda, now owned by luxury giant Grup Perelada, was founded in 1969, and its current winery was opened 20 years later, with refurbishment kicking off this year.
Head winemaker David González noted that concrete was one of the dominant winemaking materials in Rioja prior to the influx of phylloxera-stricken French winemakers who brought their Bordeaux-style small barrels with them.
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Concrete remained popular even at the time of the Viña Salceda winery’s construction almost 40 years ago, with epoxy-lined concrete tanks built into its very foundations.
“For big vessels, I prefer epoxy, but for smaller concrete vessels, such as the eggs we bought from France, I prefer without epoxy,” González shared. “If you don’t have epoxy, it must always remain full [to avoid them drying out], which is harder for larger vessels.”
Consumer preferences have also shifted.
“In the past vanilla was what people wanted, but the taste has changed – we want more fruit and less oak,” González observed. “We don’t want to be a classical winery, we want to be more contemporary.”
González’s honing of his use of concrete at Viña Salceda has resulted in a number of characterful and contemporary Riojas, in addition to its more ‘traditional’, more notably-oaked line.
Blanco Sobre Lías, the first vintage of which was 2023, is made from Viura and Tempranillo Blanco which spent four months on its lees (hence ‘sobre lías’) in concrete tanks.
“I think that Viura needs lots of time in barrel to be okay, it can be too much, so in this wine, which we began to sell six months after harvest, the concrete was perfect,” said González during a tasting of the range.
Another concrete-aged wine to watch is La Rellanilla 2023, a single varietal Tempranillo which was manually-harvested from a 5.5 hectare vineyard. It was aged on its lees in concrete tanks for around five months.
“Here we look for the fruit and the character of the wine of this village,” said González. “I don’t think it needed a barrel!”
“For us,” he continued, the most important thing for this wine is not to have too much tannin. We use infusion rather than pumping over, Tempranillo is like Barolo – if you have too much tannin, you need five-or-more years to drink it!”
González considers this to be a “new old style of Rioja”: “It’s more classic than something like a Viña Tondonia, because in the past, when Rioja didn’t use barrels often, all of the wine was made like this. New consumers think that this is a newer style for Rioja, because it’s coming back, but it’s from the past.”
He’s certainly not stopping in his quest to go back to the future using concrete.
One of the “new kids on the block” due to go to market towards the end of this year is Cabezaparda, a 100% Garnacha sourced from a vineyard in Alto Najerilla, some 700 metres above sea level. This area used to have such a cool climate that the Garnacha was only ripe enough for rosé. As conditions have become warmer in recent decades, it can now produce still reds, though González claimed that the 13.5% ABV Cabezaparda has more acidity than many of his whites.
Aged in foudres, barrels and concrete egg, this newly-bottled wine is, according to its maker, a case of “terroir more than style”.
“It is perhaps the coldest place where Garnacha is grown in Spain,” added González. “It is the freakiest thing I have made in my life. If you told me 10 years ago that I would make this wine, I wouldn’t believe you. People didn’t like this style in the past, but now it’s in fashion. This is the new Rioja, I think!”
Concrete evidence
For every rule there are exceptions, and even the wineries which are enthusiastically embracing concrete vessels still use oak barrels. After all, if you are a producer in Rioja, there is a certain expectation to have those kinds of wines in your portfolio.
The “honesty” of concrete, as Ramón Bilbao’s Lisa put it, is playing a big part in this – as a medium, it allows for the peculiarities of each vineyard to be front and centre in the wine, rather than imprinting upon it as oak can do.
If the resurgence of interest in concrete from major players in the region is indicative of anything, it is a demonstration that Rioja is anything but homogenous. During my visit, Felipe VI, King of Spain, visited Haro to mark the centenary of the establishment of Rioja as a designated wine region, though he missed out on a meeting with the drinks business (his loss). In the last 100 years winemaking philosophies have shifted back and forth, but what is abundantly clear is that there is no single future for Rioja – its wines will continue to diversify and develop.
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