Is Rioja's Juan Alcorta the world's most state-of-the-art winery?

Is Rioja's Juan Alcorta the world's most state-of-the-art winery?

Simon Crerar

Perched high on a hillside above the town of Logroño, the centre of Spain's Rioja wine region, the strikingly modern Juan Alcorta winery commands superb views of the Ebro River valley below.
Reached by a quiet windy road and surrounded by Tempranillo vines, the winery's modest, modern buildings are the elegant cork to a magnificent subterranean complex where Spain's best-known wine, Campo Viejo, is produced.
Arriving at the winery early one gorgeous autumn morning, I was taken out to see the vines on the 110-hectare estate by my guide, Campo's head winemaker Elena Adell, the stylishly dressed agricultural engineer turned viticulturist who is the driving force behind this remarkable complex.
I have visited wineries in Australia's Barossa Valley, New Zealand's Marlborough and California's Napa, all champions of modern New World winemaking techniques, but nothing prepared me for what lay beneath Juan Alcorta.
All wines created here are made seven metres underground in a giant cavern carved out of the hillside, reached down a non-descript staircase that begins beside the gaping drop chutes where the grapes arrive from plots all over Rioja 16 hours a day throughout the harvest.
The winery was constructed in 2001 with proceeds form the sale of the previous complex in Logroño. 200,000 square metres of earth were moved to make way for the high tech production facilities.
Rioja is a near perfect region for growing wine. Protected from the wildest Atlantic storms by the coastal Basque mountains, well irrigated by the Ebro River that flows from those mountains, the region sits in a sublime sheltered valley that creates ideal conditions to create ripe grapes on vertical vines growing on rocky soils.
Across Rioja, grape harvest times are determined by committee to ensure they are in optimum condition to produce wine. After delivery, the grapes cascade down from the back of lorries into giant sorting machines where the liquid is separated from the skins and stems, before being funnelled down by gravity alone into a succession of 145 giant computer controlled vats. Here millions of litres of wine are made each year, without the touch of a human hand.
"We are very happy with the winemaking process of our new bodega", explained Adell, "since it has meant that the grape and the wine move by gravity, without being subjected to any kind of pressure, enabling us to achieve a more aromatic wine with better sensations in the mouth."
Only a few decades ago grapes were still picked by hand, crushed under feet, and moved around vats by brute force. Now the entire fermentation complex at Campo Viejo employs only two people for most of the year, rising to around a dozen during the autumn harvest.
Almost all elemens of production are controlled by computer. Perched in a corner on a gantry high above stainless steel vats bigger than a London bus, seven attractive young, white coated, young female chemists diligently conduct quality controls. Here winemaker Adell says she can adjust almost every aspect of the entire operation from her desk.
Romantic it is not. However, the facility's sheer 21st century atomised splendour is a wonder to behold. Henry T Ford would approve. If James Bond ever has a showdown with a villain in a winery, you can bet it will be filmed here. Giant vats? A pink-haired, designer-clad female impresario. Hot chemists in white coats? Goldfinger's lair had nothing on this.
Next, I was led through a floor-to-ceiling door with dimensions only ever seen inside gigantic Egyptian pyramids. Although the previous vast industrial space was impressively high tech, this room was even more awe-inspiring.
Ahead of me as far as I could see were 70,000 carefully organised oak barrels. Above them, some six million bottles fermented in various stages of readiness. The silent, isolated atmosphere, free from air currents or temperature changes, helps wines complete their aging best. Eventually a bottle of Rioja aged here will make a wine lover very happy indeed.
Following a quick glance at the almost completely automated bottling and packaging line - 10,000 bottles an hour, with two men feeding flat boxes into a machine, everything else is put together with the same efficiency that produces Japanese cars - the final stage of the tour took in a tasting session of the full range of Campo Viejo's wines.
After sampling a white, a rose and a cava, we tasted reds ranging from the well-known berry flavours of the yellow-labelled Crianza, through to the vanilla and cinnamon bodied taste of the Reserva and Gran Reserva wines (the latter traditionally made only in exceptional vintages).
The futuristic tasting room was half style-bar, half dentist's laboratory. Spying some exceedingly old dusty wines in bins (Rioja isn't known for aging particularly well), I was lucky enough to taste a 1981 Reserva, a wine who's dark, almost brown colour belied an exceptionally soft, smooth, elegantly complex taste that lingered long after sipping.
Rioja offers a huge number of wine tasting opportunities. There is excellent wildlife watching and walking (the Pilgrims Way to Santiago Compostela bisects Rioja). The region is also a visual feast for architecture lovers, with new wineries designed by Santiago Calatrava, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, plus Gehry's Guggenheim dominating Bilbao, where most overseas visitors will arrive by air.

Origin information: Timesonline