2019 Ostatu Gran Reserva Blanco

A Little Capricho...

I realize I am beginning to abuse the privileges of running Terroir Club.

No red wine this month. Two Spanish wines. And now, just to make the insubordination complete, one of them is a seven-year-old white Rioja with a little skin contact.

I have considered the charges. I plead guilty.

But damn it, this wine is so wonderfully, gloriously intriguing that I simply could not leave it behind.

The 2019 Ostatu Gran Reserva Blanco is the sort of wine that reminds me why Terroir Club exists in the first place. Not necessarily to assemble twelve months of perfectly symmetrical drinking, but to occasionally wander off into some strange, delicious cul-de-sac and discover something you may never otherwise have encountered. This month, apparently, that cul-de-sac is in Rioja.

And Rioja Blanco deserves the detour.

Ostatu sits in Samaniego, in Rioja Alavesa, tucked beneath the Sierra de Cantabria, where the mountains help shelter the vineyards from the wetter Atlantic weather to the north. This is limestone country — calcareous clay, elevation, old vineyards, cool nights — and while the international reputation of Rioja was built overwhelmingly upon Tempranillo, white Rioja has its own wonderfully eccentric history.

Viura is at the heart of it. It is not an especially bombastic grape in youth, which turns out to be rather the point. Its great gift is its ability to hold acidity and evolve slowly, gathering complexity rather than merely losing fruit. In the right hands, mature Viura can become one of Spain's great vinous shape-shifters: waxy, saline, herbal, nutty, smoky, citrusy and profoundly savory.

Ostatu pushes directly into that tradition with this Gran Reserva Blanco, while giving it a distinctly contemporary intelligence. The wine comes from old vines and is built for maturation rather than immediate gratification. There is a period of skin contact, which is important here — not enough to turn this into some wildly tannic orange-wine experiment, but enough to extract another layer of phenolic texture, aroma and structure. That little bit of contrarian mischief gives the wine a gentle grip and breadth that become increasingly fascinating as it ages.

And this one has aged.

Seven years.

That is where things become deliciously weird.

The youthful citrus and orchard fruit have begun their metamorphosis. Think preserved lemon, quince, yellow apple and dried apricot moving toward beeswax, chamomile, toasted almond and hazelnut. There is something faintly resinous and herbal lurking underneath — dried Mediterranean herbs, fennel, perhaps a little saffron — along with the savory, almost bouillon-like complexity that great mature white Rioja can develop. Then comes a bracing mineral salinity, keeping everything from becoming ponderous.

It is broad without being fat, oxidative in suggestion rather than exhaustion, and textural without sacrificing freshness. The skin contact gives the palate an almost tea-like phenolic tension, while bottle age has begun sanding the edges into something beautifully mellifluous. It is simultaneously cerebral and gourmand: the sort of wine you can spend twenty minutes dissecting before realizing you have accidentally drunk half the bottle.

And this is emphatically a food wine. Roast chicken with crispy skin would be magnificent. Jamón Ibérico, naturally. Manchego. Grilled octopus. Salt cod. Mushrooms. Pork with herbs. Paella. Anything involving saffron, almonds, garlic or browned butter suddenly seems like a very good idea. This is white wine operating with much of the gastronomic authority usually reserved for red.

Which brings me back to my minor act of Terroir Club heresy.

Yes, there is no red wine this month. Yes, I have somehow given you two wines from Spain. Yes, one of those wines has skin contact. I understand how this looks.

But Terroir Club should occasionally be allowed a little capriccio — a moment of inspired deviation from the expected. And this is precisely the sort of bottle worth breaking the rules for, because it is not something I can simply reorder once it's gone.

This is essentially a one-shot wine. I get access to this perfectly matured release only once a year. The winery has already done the patient part for you: instead of buying young white Rioja and wondering what it might become someday, you get it at seven years old, right as all those fascinating secondary and tertiary flavors are beginning to unfurl.

And when this allocation is gone, it is gone.

So I stretched the club a little.

Actually, I stretched it quite a lot.

But somewhere between the preserved lemon, beeswax, toasted almond, chamomile, saffron, limestone salinity and that unrepentant little whisper of skin contact, I stopped feeling particularly apologetic about it.

Some wines are worth breaking the rules for. This is one of them.