I Don't Believe In Much, But I Believe In Old Vines
The first of several essays from Rioja during harvest season.
There are good years and bad years. This has been a bad year, a very bad year, in so many ways. No, I am not just talking about wine. At least, not in the facile way that wine people usually talk about years. I write this from my little balcony on the Plaza del Mercado in Logroño, the capital of Rioja, listening to the cathedral bells ring at sunset, as people begin crowding the bars for their evening pintxos. But I feel only partly here, with part of me tethered online watching what feels like the unraveling of the American experiment.
There’s been a lot written lately about the crisis of cultural criticism. But the cultural sphere of wine seems to exist outside this discourse. “There are years that ask questions and years that answer,” Zora Neale Hurston famously wrote. If Hurston had been a middling wine writer she might have added: …and years that are ‘challenging’ and years that are ‘vintages of the century.’
As it happens, this is also not a good year in Rioja. Now, I am talking about wine. It’s harvest time, and the vineyards of Rioja have been devastated by hail and mildew during this summer’s growing season. All over the region, you hear winegrowers talk about having lost 30 or 60 or 80 percent or in some cases, all of their grapes this year. There’s a lot of talk of 2025’s vintage being “challenging,” which is wine people’s universal euphemism for “shitty.”
“It’s a negative year. People are in a bad mood,” winemaker Javier Arizcuren told me, over lunch at Casa Tila, a tiny arrocería with five tables in the hilltop village of Clavijo.
Arizcuren is an architect whose father and grandfather were winegrowers, but in 2013 he took over the family vineyards and started his own eponymous wine label. He’s part of a new wave of winemakers in Rioja—“a movement to recover our roots,” as he calls it—pushing against the industrial model that’s existed in Rioja for decades, since the mid-20th century when, after the Spanish Civil War, small family wineries were usurped by big cooperatives.
“There’s a difference between a good vintage and good year,” Arizcuren said. “It’s not just about the weather, it’s also the environment. Farmers are upset about grape prices, everything. Farmers need to be able to be proud of their jobs, and they have to be paid.” All over the world, wine faces this crisis. People don’t drink as much as they used to—and when they do, they don’t want the cheap, bulk wine that the industry has been based on for decades. Over in France, half of that country’s winemakers will retire over the next 10 years, and there are not enough young people willing to replace them.
There are simply less and less people like Arizcuren who want to take over their family’s vineyards. “We have to recover our aim, the life path. But it’s difficult now to find it, to see the future, to think about the future, a future working in the vineyard with your family. We’ve lost this right now,” he said.
Things weren’t all bad. Even though Arizcuren was muddling through this negative harvest season, we enjoyed a lovely, decadent Spanish lunch beginning at 2:30 pm and stretching until almost 6:00 pm, starting with a degustación of heirloom tomatoes, fresh from the restaurant’s garden, moving on with pisto (a Riojan vegetable stew similar to ratatouille or caponata) and finally arriving at Casa Tila’s main event, the slow-cooked, paella-like rice dishes. We chose arroz de patitas with tender baby lamb leg, and creamy arroz meloso de iberíco, with pork ribs. This long lunch itself felt like a small protest against productivity and hustle culture.
We opened a white wine, Sierra de Toloño ‘Nahikun,’ made by Sandra Bravo, a fellow winemaker also among Rioja’s new-wave movement. Bravo, when I’ve spoken to her, is more blunt about her resistance to the industrial wine model. “We have to destroy this system and start over again,” she once told me.
As we drank Bravo’s exceptional field blend, made from 80 year-old vines, Arizcuren and I talked about the upcoming harvests of his own old vineyards. His oldest, Barranco del Prado, grows at more 2,500 feet elevation, and is 130 years old—meaning they survived the phylloxera parasite that devastated European vineyards in the 19th century.
You hear a lot about “old vines” in wine talk. It’s an overused, nebulous term, which often causes normal everyday wine drinkers to roll their eyes. As Bravo once told me: “People got interested in old vines and then everything was old vines. Suddenly, there were no more young vines in the whole world.” It’s one of those precious wine concepts that seems fake or pretend.
When people ask, “Why do old vines make better (or at least more complex or intense) wines?” there certainly is a standard agricultural answer: As the vine ages, it produces less grapes, but those grapes are more concentrated; and vines that have survived for so long tend to adapt better to years with bad weather. But I find that this rarely seems to satisfy someone skeptical of “old vines.”
“Old” vines can mean different ages in different parts of the world. I’ve had winemakers in Barolo and Napa and Loire define 30- or 40-year-old vineyards to me as “old vines.” Meanwhile, in Rioja, it’s commonplace to find vines planted 80, 90, or 100 years ago—thick, gnarled, twisted trunks that look more like a bush or a tree than trellised younger vines, usually offering just a few precious hanging bunches of grapes.
A few days before lunch with Arizcuren at Casa Tila, I’d dined with another of the region’s new-wave winemakers, Oxer Bastegieta of Oxer Wines. We tasted the 2024 vintage of Oxer’s top red wine, Kalamity, which comes from a 102-year-old vineyard plot, in the Basque part of Rioja. “This is my nemesis,” he said of Kalamity. “He will teach me everything. The light and the dark, the yin and the yang. I don’t sleep because of this one.”
Oxer often speaks like this. When I tasted the 2024 vintage of Kalamity a few months prior, straight from the barrel in his cellar, he asked, “Are you ready to talk to god?” as he poured it from the pipette into my glass. He once told me that he didn’t like wines with a lot of oak aging because, “I don’t like wine that feels like I’m sucking the nose of Pinocchio.”
I appreciate the way that, on his labels, Oxer quotes from writers like Goethe, Shakespeare, and Herman Hesse. He names his 100 percent garnacha for the classic Leonard Cohen song “Suzanne.” Kalamity’s quote comes from Carl Jung: “In all chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder, a secret order.”
Oxer was born in Gernika, the Basque town most of us know by its Spanish name Guernica—bombed by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil in 1937 at the request of then-emerging dictator Francisco Franco. The violence and destruction inspired Pablo Picasso’s powerful, moving anti-war painting. Oxer said Guernica inspired the label for Ahari, his entry-level wine, named after a mischief-making elf in Basque mythology with a tortured face. The quote on that bottle comes from Picasso: “Everything you can imagine is real.”
Oxer arrived in Rioja from Basque Country in 2009. “Nowhere else in the world has the old vineyards that we have here in Rioja, some of the oldest vines in the world,” he told me. “The problem is that people here don’t believe in themselves. There are so many mediocre wines here because people don’t believe they can make better. They are standing in front of the best vineyards in the world. They have to believe in themselves.” He added: “I believed it from the first fucking moment I got here.”
His 2024 Kalamity had just been bottled, so Oxer brought it to our lunch at Restaurante Alameda in Fuenmayor—honestly, one of my favorite restaurants in the world. We kept coming back to Kalamity as we moved through courses of shrimp-filled ravioli, delicately roasted red mullet, and the star of Alameda’s menu, the massive chuletón, or bone-in ribeye.
Kalamity is one of the most coveted bottles in Rioja, and I’ve been sampling it through several vintages now—it’s always fresh, crunchy, perfumed, with lively swirling tannins and beautiful, black fruit, and aromas and flavors of wild herb, pepper and spice, and darker, forest notes. But that’s just tasting notes. This 2024 is on a different level, one that is hard describe. It’s a wine with tension, a wine that makes you feel things.
I remember being in the Kalamity vineyard last September, while Oxer harvested this wine. Chaos and disorder seemed to rule that day, and there was a sense of tension and urgency, possibly because Oxer had made a decision to harvest early because rains were coming. Could the old vines sense that urgency? Can you taste that tension in the wine? Some of you will likely roll your eyes. But remember what Picasso said: “Everything you can imagine is real.”
For Oxer, there’s a porous boundary between the human, plant, and spiritual worlds. “You have to feel the plant like a companion, not something you own and use,” he once told me. “Can you imagine what a 100-year-old vineyard knows? He learns the climate, he learns the conditions, the patterns. He begins to regulate himself. The plants can live without us. We can’t live without them.”
As we entered hour three of our lunch, I asked Oxer why he thinks people can be so skeptical about the concept of old vines. “In some way,” he said, “we’ve lost our connection with the old world, the spiritual world. We think too much about the scientific world rather than the spiritual world, but we should join both worlds.” He added, cryptically as always: “Soil is darkness, but always in the darkness, there’s light. Soil is a world we don’t really understand. It’s mix of magic and microbiology.”
As we finished our meal with a Basque style cheesecake, Oxer told me that 2025 will be a different story than 2024. He’d lost at least 60 percent of this year’s grapes to the summer hailstorms.
A few days after my lunch with Oxer, I visited Juan Carlos Sancha, a university professor with a doctorate in enology who started his own wine label in 2008. Many of the winemakers of Rioja’s new wave were his students. The day I visited Sancha was the first day of his harvest. “It’s incredible how early the harvest is!” he said. “My father and grandfather never harvested here until October.” This, and not just extreme weather events like hail, is the new normal in Rioja.
Before Sancha took me to his own 120-year-old family vineyard, he drove to a forested area near his village of Baños de Río Tobía to show me something truly amazing. Here, along a quiet trail, were 223 plants of vitis sylvestris, the ancient grape species, winding through the trees.
Vitis sylvestris is the ancestor of vitis vinifera, from which most modern wine is made. Modern vitis vinifera plants are hermaphroditic, meaning they have both male and female reproductive structures, and can self-pollinate. But these ancient vitis sylvestris in the forest were all either male or female. Each of the 223 plants gave a completely different grape variety, and when they reproduced, a completely new variety would be created—just like human beings. Sancha had written an academic paper on these vines, and even made micro-batches of wine with their grapes. He reports that the wine was green, bitter, and undrinkable.
Now, yes, this is all super wine nerd stuff. But to put it into perspective, seeing vines that existed as they were before humans first domesticated grapevines is sort is like encountering some wolf-like creature that existed before humans first domesticated the dog. “These came before humans,” Sancha told me. “There’s no need for pruning. They take care of themselves. The first human people probably ate these grapes. And they probably made wine from them. But we don’t really know.”
We don’t really know. We too often pretend that we know everything about everything—whether it’s about wine or anything else. And if we don’t, we think we can just ask ChatGPT. But there is so much we don’t really know, and never will know. Looking at these ancient vines, I remembered that wine goes so far back into human pre-history that the root word of wine predates the advent of Indo-European languages, and is the same in nearly all human language families. So we have no idea when or how the first wine was made, or by who. But we can imagine it, whether real or not. Though, we would do well to remember, that imagining can serve many narratives.
After I parted ways with Javier Arizcuren after our lunch in Clavijo, I tried to take some photos of the village’s 9th century castle, built by the Moors. Unfortunately, it was covered in scaffolding, under renovation. Legend has it that, in 844, the Battle of Clavijo took place between the Christian troops of the Spanish king and the Muslim troops of the Emir of Córdoba. Saint James, one of Jesus’ apostles, (allegedly) appeared in the king’s dreams, and promised victory—and indeed, the Christians (allegedly) won the battle. For centuries, the Battle of Clavijo was a symbol of the Christians expulsion of the Muslims from the Iberian peninsula. Modern historians agree that the battle is fictional—made up in the 13th century as propaganda—and never actually happened.
I’m told that people in and around Clavijo still believe it’s true.
I MUST taste Kalamity. I DO believe in the mystical power of old vines, and I love this writing so so much. 2026 will be better. We are resilient, and know how to survive, like the old vines do. Thank you for this inspiring writing !
It sounds to me like Juan Carlos Sancha's work with vitis sylvestris is similar to what Randall Grahm is doing with his Popelouchum project here in California. The concept of creating new vines in old places is intriguing. Your description of Kalamity is compelling on a similar scale, and I've found a source for Oxer's wines in Los Angeles. They are not inexpensive, but why buy 1er Burgundy when one can drink inspiration?