Few can argue that Rioja is Spain’s greatest contribution to the world of wine. This beautifully mature bottle encapsulates everything we find most enthralling about this timeless region. Recently, it’s become challenging to find wines faithful to Rioja’s traditional style. We taste numerous “modern” Riojas every year that combines boozy overripe fruit with a thick lacquer of sticky French oak. Bodega Akutain is the diametric opposite—this family’s wines are full of life and overflowing with the finely detailed meaty and sweet aromas with a rustic, dusty texture that exemplifies why Rioja is one of the world’s great terroirs. But unlike our other favorite old school Rioja estates, Lopez de Heredia and Peciña, who farm hundreds of hectares, Bodega Akutain is a truly artisanal farmstead.
Here you will find just one father, one son, a small horse stable-turned-cellar, and a mere 6.5 hectares of organically hand-farmed vines clinging to some of Rioja’s highest elevation limestone hillsides. After 9+ years of slow hibernation, this wine is screaming into its prime drinking window. Look no further if you wish to experience a shining example of mature, deeply traditional and ready-to-drink Rioja.
Bodega Akutain’s history begins in the early 1970s with the small family property’s founder, Juan Peñagaricano Akutain. At the time, Akutain was a young man living in the Basque country while working as a traveling salesman for a company that offered refrigeration and cooling systems to wineries. Despite the sometimes mundane nature of his work, the young Señor Akutain forged personal and meaningful bonds with the families behind some of the Rioja region’s most storied traditionalist estates like CVNE and La Rioja Alta. After many years spent visiting the cellars, studying local vineyard techniques, and drinking every bottle of Rioja he could lay his hands on—but all the while saving his earnings—Akutain was ready to plant his own vineyards. Juan spent a few years of searching for the perfect site and finally in 1975 he found his dream property located just 5km west of the village of Haro, in the wine producing epicenter of Rioja. Here, Juan Akutain planted 6.5 hectares of vineyards to Tempranillo (85%), Garnacha (14+%), and Viura (<1%). Over the years Juan continued to work as an engineer and salesman while training, pruning and harvesting his vineyards during off hours. Now, after 41 years of pruning and training alongside his young son, Jon, these same vines are what produce this wine.
The Akutain family's vineyards are located high in the mountainous Rioja Alta subregion. This is without question the most historically important area of Rioja, with high elevation, limestone-dominated vineyards producing fruit for large, grand estates like Lopez de Heredia. Bodega Akutain’s four small vineyards are perched between 1,500 and 2,000 feet elevation. In addition to the structure and minerality that only limestone can impart, this elevation ensures that Akutain’s wines remain balanced and share little in common with the overheated, barrique-aged, and sometimes almost Port-like wines pumped out by many of Rioja’s “modern” producers in the warmer, flatter Rioja Alavesa and Rioja Baja subregions. Speaking of barriques, it is mandatory to point out that Bodega Akutain does not own a single French Oak barrel. To court mainstream global wine tastes, many Rioja producers have transitioned to aging their wines in small French oak barrels over the last two decades.
The Akutain family, however, has remained staunchly old school and still practices the Rioja tradition of working exclusively with high-quality oak barrels from our own Appalachian region. And this not just a minor technicality, American oak, while sometimes perceived as unwieldy and dominant in a wine’s youth, is an absolutely necessary aromatic and textural component when a traditional Rioja like this wine reaches adolescence and full maturity. In Tempranillo-based Rioja, the American oak barrel’s premature vanilla and coconut aromas soon evolve and mellow, integrating and eventually disappearing into the wine’s savory and meaty backdrop. Similarly, its once ample oak tannins gradually soften and become a delicate support structure for Rioja’s soft, round fruit. So, one of the great joys of cellaring Rioja is pulling out an older wine that was once muscular, broad shouldered and perhaps too oaky, and appreciating how just 5-10 years have transformed it into something far more sophisticated, complex and soulful. At 9+ years of age, this wine is a perfect example of how in Rioja, with the help of a little time, all these disparate components come together in gorgeous harmony. With this wine, especially, they have produced a magical sum far greater than the parts.
In the glass, the 2006 Bodega Akutain Rioja Reserva announces its entry into peak maturity with a garnet core and auburn, orange and amber tones beginning to show at the rim. Classic cellar-aged Rioja aromas rise from the glass with dried strawberries, baked plums, sweet tobacco, dried roses, oiled leather, terracotta, cacao nibs, freshly baked gingerbread and baking spices. This wine’s soft and luxurious palate is medium in body, but it possesses a depth and presence that fill one’s mouth with deceiving generosity in every sip. As with all great Rioja Reserva that is entering its peak drinking window, we can expect this bottle to show beautifully for at least another decade. Unlike Burgundy, my experience with mature Rioja is that the wines often spend more time in their prime then they do in adolescence or their final decline. Sure, they lose some color and fruit along the way, but more often than not, the best traditional examples remain vibrant and delicious for many years, and that is a gift that few other wines can offer. Still, this wine is absolutely delicious today so don’t wait—all you need to do is decant it for one hour and serve it at 62 degrees in large Bordeaux stems. For an incredible experience and insane pairing, do yourself a favor and transport yourself to Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. Here, at his restaurant Amada, Chef Jose Garces prepares one of the most memorable lamb dishes in America. Sometimes he serves them simply as these delicious, breaded cutlets. But the best incarnation is when Chef Garces slices a rack of lamb into individual chops, hollows and stuff them with the herbed goat cheese mixture before finally deep frying them with a crisp, golden brown egg dredge/panko breadcrumb coating. They are delivered to your plate crispy and molten while swimming in a cool sauce romesco. With the rib bone still attached, these lamb “lollipops” are the quintessential companion for this wine.
