How Yjar shines a light on the shared history of Rioja and Bordeaux

A cult wine in the making is how I described Yjar in my tasting notes in the September Releases report. All the same, it was a strange choice in many ways for a Spanish winemaker to chose the Place de Bordeaux for the launch and sole distribution channel of a new wine, especially a winemaker as fiercely proud of the potential of Rioja as Telmo Rodriguez.

‘I believe this project can change the history of Rioja’s relationship with Bordeaux after 241 years,’ is how he put it when I asked him for the reason behind his choice.

Rodgriguez (everybody calls him Telmo, so let’s switch to that) has long been critical of the Rioja system. ’A region of 65,000ha sold almost entirely under just one name?’ is one of his frustrations, and he has loudly championed the creation of individual vineyard sites, named villages on labels, and individual crus that are a better reflection of the potential and rich diversity of Rioja’s landscapes.

He famously left his home estate of Remelluri in 1998, after disagreeing with his father’s purchasing of grapes outside of their own property to blend in with that of Remelluri, so diluting the character of the site. And it was in Bordeaux, so he has told me on several occasions, that he credits his first steps towards really falling in love with wine. Not only was his mother French, he also studied oenology at the university here, and worked at Cos d’Estournel alongside his mentor Bruno Prats. He spent time with other key French winemakers including Eloi Dürrbach and Gérard Chave, and together they opened his mind to the idea of a Grand Cru.

‘Yjar gives me the courage and the opportunity to prove that the concept of an individual cru in Rioja can work. I believe that the Place de Bordeaux can be a loudspeaker for that’.

And beyond that, he sees Yjar as part of the long history that twins Rioja with Bordeaux.

It is a history that is commonly thought to date back to the devastation of Phylloxera, when dozens of Bordeaux merchants crossed the Pyrenees to source wines to replace those they had lost to the disease. It led to the creation of the Médoc-Alaves project (at on point 10%of the local production of Labastida went to the Medoc-Alaves system, and always the best grapes and best vineyards). Its success was such as reportedly Bordeaux imported nearly as much wine from Rioja during the 1870s as it exported to the rest of the world.

Others date the relationship back to when Guillermo Hurtado de Amezaga, the future Marquis de Riscal, moved to Bordeaux from Rioja in the 1830s, and formed friendships that would lead to a long exchange of winemaking and viticultural skills between the the two regions.

In fact the history between the two regions dates back even further than that – and it began in Labastida, the village where Remelluri – and now Yjar – is located, in the foothills of the Sierra de Toloño mountains, on slopes beneath a monastery that was settled by Hieronymite monks, creating a monastic farm that included winemaking. Monks lived on the site from 1420 until 1838, until a fire destroyed the building. The land lay abandoned for a further century until Telmo’s father bought the estate in the 1960s.

‘Not only were many of the monks in the monastery above Remelluri French,’ says Telmo, ‘but in 1787 in Labastida, Manuel Quintano made the first modern wine in Spain,’ referring to the first winemaker in Rioja to use wine-making concepts that were then being employed by classified châteaux in the Médoc.

Frank Prial in the New York Times in 1996 wrote about this. ‘(Quintano) vinified in wooden vats, racked his wines to remove solid matter and matured them in oak casks. For his far-sightedness, he was penalized by the government of Castille, which was reacting to the jealousy of other Rioja producers. When he was forced by decree to sell his wines for less than his competitors, he gave up and went back to the old ways’.

Prial also writes about Luciano de Murrieta, who after fighting on the losing side of a civil war, fled to London for five years, from 1843 to 1848. Impressed by the Bordeaux wines he drank there, he went to France for two years to study wine making. When he returned to Rioja in 1850, he introduced the methods he learnt there into the cellar of his patron, the Duque de la Victoria.

Telmo’s wine is named after another Duke – the Duque de Hijar (let’s make that the Duke of Yjar), a hereditary title dating back to 1483 whose lands included the monastery that sits above Remelluri’s 94ha vineyard.

‘Ever since I came back to Remelluri in 2009, I have wanted to find a small part of our vineyard to do something exceptional with,’ Rodgriguez says. ‘My sister Amaia and I have worked on this for the past 10 years, questioning what is the heart of Remelluri’. They dug geological pits across the site (his partner in many previous winemaking projects, Pablo Eguzkiza, is a Professor of viticulture and an expert in terroir), and found a 3.8ha site near to the chapel, on a slope with 35cm-wide pudding stones from the mountains, with pure clay over limestone, well drained and of exceptional quality, planted with a massal selection of Tempranillo, Graciano, Garnacha, Granegro and Rojal. It was a place where, as Rodriguez puts it, ‘we could create the dream of a grand cru, with its own entirely separate identity’.

There are many wineries in Rioja today with more concrete links to Bordeaux. Marques de Riscal of course, but also Macan, founded through a partnership between the Rothschilds of Château Clarke in the Médoc and the Alvarez family of Vega Sicilia, or even CVNE, Tondonia or Rioja Alta, all wineries built around the Haro station district that grew up as demand for Rioja boomed, and the railway provided the means to supply it directly to Bordeaux. It’s not even the only Spanish wine available through the Place – the 2016 vintage of VivaltuS from Ribera del Duero, a collaboration between the Yllera family and Jean-Claude Berrouet, also launched on La Place in September 2021.

Yjar, in contrast, takes inspiration from the spirit of the shared history, rather than anything concrete. It is a way to move the conversation forward.

‘I am always looking to understand the emotion of a wine,’ says Telmo, ‘and I feel here I have found it. In the 19th century the Rioja wine board went to learn from Bordeaux, but when they came back they used Bordeaux methods rather than Bordeaux grapes. This was true also for the Marquis de Riscal – he brought the culture from Bordeaux but kept working with local grapes. My intention equally is to draw inspiration, and to create what I hope can be an important project for Spain.

There is a vibration, a movement in Rioja right now to find real vignerons, making real wine,’ says Telmo. ‘We have to fight for our great wines and to be proud of these amazing vineyards. And Bordeaux can help us show our talent to a global audience’.

Read the Yjar 2017 note here in The September Releases report