A ‘76 gran reserva that I shared with the bearish gregarious 30-year-old Juan Muga at a restaurant in Haro

A ‘76 gran reserva that I shared with the bearish, gregarious 30-year-old Juan Muga at a restaurant in Haro lingers in my memory as one of the best old burgundies I never drank.Next time you’re feeling palate fatigue from trying to chew the latest super-extracted new world merlot, you might consider checking out the subtle and delicate charms of an old gran reserva.Bacchanalian Dreambook – The Wine List at La Tour D’ArgentThe most exciting wine book I’ve read in recent years, without question, is the carte de vin at La Tour d’Argent, the renowned Paris landmark on the quai de la Tournelle in the fifth arrondissement. You can find the ‘95 and the ‘96 on retailers’ shelves; both have the kind of spicy complexity that develops only with age and both taste kind of like fruitcake, only much better And if you are lucky, you may find older vintages. Founded in 1582, the restaurant is famous for the views of the Seine from the sixth-floor dining room, for its ?te clientele, and for its caneton press?aka pressed duck, the millionth of which was served last April to great fanfare I personally consumed duck no 999,426, and have the commemorative postcard to prove it. While this may sound like one of those annoying instances where you have to listen to a wine writer tease you with descriptions of stuff you will never see or taste, the fact is that all of these wines have been recently released. In this regard, Lopez de Heredia reminds me of Orson Welles’ embarrassing ad for Paul Masson: “We sell no wine before its time.”Across the street, Muga is releasing its gran reservas on a slightly more accelerated schedule.

“The spiders eat the cork flies,” Lopez de Heredia explains cheerfully as I swipe a vast cobweb off my face. Any minute now, I feel certain Vincent Price is going to jump out at me.The tasting of reds begins with the ethereal ‘85 Tondonia, which has an amazing nose of cinnamon, clove, leather, tobacco – the whole spice box. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the winery complex resembles a Swiss or Bavarian village. Inside, it resembles the set of a low-budget horror movie, with ancient and vaguely sinister-looking machinery, huge blackened tinas, and a fluffy black mould blanketing almost everything.Far below the fermentation and storage vats, in a series of tunnels carved out of the limestone, tens of thousands of bottles dating from the 1920s slumber beneath the pillowy mould. Tondonia is one of those secret passwords whereby serious wine wonks recognise their own kind.

The winery was founded in 1877, and apparently very little has changed in terms of wine-making since. The Tondonia vineyard is beautifully situated on a high south-facing plateau outside Haro. In addition to its old-school wines, notably the gran reserva, Muga does make a more modern expression of rioja with French oak under the Torre Muga label, including a new postmodern luxury cuv?called Aro.Not so Lopez de Heredia, the hardest-core reactionaries of rioja, makers of Vi?ondonia. Somehow you get the idea that this is how red wine used to taste.If the old school had a central campus, it would be a series of buildings clustered around the railroad tracks at the edge of the medieval town of Haro, including the bodegas Muga and Lopez de Heredia.

Both wineries keep several coopers employed year-round, making and repairing barrels and maintaining the huge tinas — the swimming-pool-sized oak vats in which the wine is fermented and stored; old oak doesn’t impart a woody flavour to wine, and both wineries believe it’s superior to stainless steel. Both houses are also run by the direct descendants of their founders.If some evil genie told me I could drink just one producer’s rioja from now on, I would certainly choose Muga. And those with bottle age can suggest practically the entire spice rack, not to mention the cigar box. What we now think of as the old style in rioja was created in the 1850s, when French wine-brokers arrived in Spain after o?um and, later, phylloxera had devastated their native vineyards. The French introduced oak-barrel ageing to the region, which had previously specialised in light, fruity, short-lived plonk.