Why Maturana Matters
What a lesser-known grape, grown by a tiny winery in Rioja, can tell us about size, scale, and the future of wine.
Even in bad years, winemakers have to make wine. As the old adage goes: Anyone can make decent wine in good years. The bad years are the ones that show who’s great and who’s merely average. Bad years are when dogma, status quo, the common wisdom, and dated marketing strategies must be cast aside.
As I talked about last week, this has been a bad growing season in Rioja, where I spent the last few weeks. Throughout the spring and summer, there was lots of mildew and hail damage, with significant losses in many vineyards. There will be a shortage of grapes harvested this year. For the first time in decades, the Consejo Regulador, Rioja’s regulatory body, set strict limits on grape yields for each village—presumably to stop bad actors from trucking in lower-quality grapes from elsewhere in Spain to meet demand. The Consejo’s director general called it “a devastating year.”
And yet, there will still be plenty of great wines made from this vintage, just fewer of them. And perhaps a year like this will cause new ways of thinking about Rioja wines to emerge.
Like many Rioja winegrowers, my friend Elena Corzana had hail damage in her vineyards in the village of Navarrete, though she considers herself fortunate that the damage was contained. Her cousin, for instance, lost all of the grapes in their vineyard.
A few Saturdays ago, a week before her full harvest began, Elena decided to do a pre-harvest of maturana tinta vines that had been damaged by hail. Normally, during this type of pre-harvest, she would snip these bunches and let them drop to the ground—allowing the healthy bunches to thrive and ripen. But this year, Elena decided to try and experiment, to harvest the damaged grapes and make a rosé from them. “This will be something I won’t sell, just for myself and friends,” she said.
I joined her, along with her brother and an another friend, in the vineyard early in the morning to harvest the damaged maturana tinta. It’s always fascinating to work alongside a winemaker in the vineyard. Of course, I am a complete amateur and, in my fumbling, I managed to get stung by a wasp on my hand. “Don’t be too worried about what you snip,” Elena told me. She was nicely urging me to work a little faster and not overthink—not bad advice for me even outside of the vineyard. I wasn’t too much of a liability, though, since there wasn’t that much to harvest, just enough boxes to fit inside Elena’s small van.
After we brought the grapes back to her bodeguita, we ate a well-earned breakfast of peppers and eggs on fresh bread, washed down with cold rosé. Then, we immediately dumped the maturana tinta into an old-school wooden press. Elena and I took our shoes off and foot-stomped the grapes, and the pink juice dumped into a steel tank ready for fermentation.
The following Saturday, with a few more experienced people to hand-pick the grapes and a tractor to carry the boxes, we did the real harvest of the healthy maturana tinta.
To be clear, Elena Corzana’s winery is an anomaly within Rioja. In a region known for mega-wineries, cranking out millions of bottles, Elena only produces only around 4,000 bottles per year. In a region dominated by one grape—tempranillo—her focus on Rioja’s lesser-known grapes, particularly maturana, is unique.
So why am I telling you about the harvest of one tiny producer—who doesn’t even have an U.S. importer—who works with an obscure grape you’ve likely never tasted or heard of?
First of all, like many legacy wine regions, Rioja is dominated by its biggest players. That truth is both bad and good. On the positive side, people all over the world know and respect the wines of Rioja.
Last year, I visited one of Rioja’s most critically-acclaimed wineries, Marqués de Murrieta—a behemoth that produces around one million bottles per year. During my visit, workers busily prepared for the harvest, readying nearly 50 tanks that would hold wine from more than 300 hectares. The majority of Marqués de Murrieta’s production is its “entry-level” Reserva (aged 24 months in American oak, then another few years in bottle; the current release is 2020). That focus on aging means, at any given moment, there are more than four million bottles resting in the Marqués de Murrieta cellar. Its library of great vintages contains 100,000 bottles dating back to the 1860s.
There are a lot of big numbers like this in Rioja, and they can often be overwhelming. 66,638 hectares of vineyards. 13,078 grape growers. Nearly 600 wineries churning out nearly 200 million liters each year. Rioja’s cellars contain more barrels than any other region in the world. But the most important figures are these: More than 90 percent of the wine is produced by less than 100 of those 600 wineries.
Rioja is big in an era when many of us are skeptical of big. As the public relations person giving the tour at Marqués de Murrieta told me, “When I suggest a gran reserva, many of my friends say ‘nooooo.’ Their opinion is that gran reserva is an oaky wine that’s something their grandfather drank.”
As with other of the world’s classic wine regions, this kind of changing tastes, and a backlash against the status quo, has spawned an exciting new wave in Rioja—which I’ve written about at length. The generational revolution of younger winemakers—who eschew the traditional aging designations of crianza and reserva and make fresher, more terroir-driven wines—has created two very different, and separate, worlds within the appellation.
This generational divide comes at a time when the traditional wine industry is in crisis. In Rioja, grape prices are unsustainably low, millions of liters of unsold wine languishes in cellars, and a number of large wineries stand on the verge of bankruptcy. As Tim Atkin reported in late 2023, the regional government wanted to destroy millions of liters of surplus wine to try to balance supply and demand. Within the appellation, there are proposals to destroy surplus wine and to uproot up to 10,000 hectares of vines. You can feel the tension of this crisis as you travel around the region.
Elena Corzana represents the other side of Rioja. She belongs to the Asociación Menudas Bodegas de Rioja, a group of 12 winemakers who produce less than 5,000 bottles per year, which is about .005 percent of what they make at Marqués de Murrieta in a year.
All of these wineries are run by a single person, most of whom have other day jobs. Elena, for instance, works as an enologist consulting in other parts of Spain. “We want to highlight this way of life and this contribution of value to the territory,” she said in her speech at the press conference when the group launched last year. “All the wineries of Menudas Bodegas are in the old houses of the villages, the old wineries. We are preserving that heritage, and our small projects give value to the region. We want to highlight our way of life and our contribution of value.”
The Menudas Bodegas producers insist that they are not against the bigger producers, and all are enthusiastic members of the Rioja appellation at large. Instead, they want to represent something intangible and essential to the soul of Rioja: the solitary vigneron that has been the historical backbone of the region. They feel invested in bridging the divide between the old and new styles.
I visited with one of the association members, Jairo Mora Manzanares, whose winery Bodegas Jairus makes only 1,000 bottles. Mora Manzanares runs Jairus in the off hours of his job as a journalist. “In Rioja in the 1980s and 1990s, this was very normal for someone to have a principal job and then to keep the vineyards of the family on the weekend,” he said. “My father was able to send me to study journalism in Madrid because of the money he made working his vineyard on Saturday and Sunday.” He added: “This idea is going away because there’s no money in it any more.”
For such a tiny winery, Jairus has a surprisingly high profile in the tapas bars of Logroño, often on the bar right next to bottles from companies that make a thousand times the number of bottles. Mora Manzanares believes there’s something symbolic about this. “The appellation is dominated by the bigger cellars, and for the past 20 or 30 years Rioja, went for quantity instead of quality. All the marketing was made for old people. And young people don’t see themselves in Rioja wine,” he said.
Mora Manzanares believes it’s everyone’s job, big and small, to change this perception. “We all have to change the course in Rioja,” Mora Manzanares said. “Ours is just another vision of Rioja.”
Which brings us back to the grape, to maturana tinta. By any definition, maturana tinta is a minor grape. There are only about 300 hectares of the maturana tinta vines grown among Rioja’s 66,000+ hectares.
Until recently, maturana tinta was widely misidentified in the wine world. Even the trusted encyclopedia Wine Grapes, by José Vouillamoz, Jancis Robinson, and Julia Harding (one of my primary sources for Godforsaken Grapes) got it wrong, identifying it as a synonym of trousseau. In fact, Wikipedia still incorrectly directs searches for maturana tinta to an entry for trousseau. (Which returns again to last week’s theme: So often, we don’t know.)
But maturana tinta is actually a synonym of the castets grape in southwest France. The grape is related to cabernet franc and has similar characteristics—Elena Corzana’s maturana bottlings give serious Loire red vibes, elegant and savory. Corzana ferments hers in amphora made from local Navarrate clay.
The grape was always found in old Rioja vineyards, particularly near Elena’s village, and was historically called maturana tinta da Navarrete. Its revival in Rioja is relatively recent—it was only approved for planting by the Consejo in 2007.
Of course, the reason why maturana tinta almost disappeared—and why other blending grapes such as graciano or mazuelo became harder to find—is because in the mid- to late-20th century, tempranillo became king and the region became nearly mono-varietal. Even today, tempranillo represents about 80 percent of the vines in Rioja.
“Tempranillo is a good variety, but it doesn’t have to be the only one,” says Juan Carlos Sancha, the university professor and enologist who I talked about last week. “In Rioja, we have a crisis, but it’s a crisis of tempranillo.” Sancha also makes a maturana tinta, as does Oxer Wines.
Elena Corzana sees herself as a caretaker of maturana tinta, which is the grape of her village. “We lost a lot when people pulled out all the old grapes and planted tempranillo,” she said.
Which is why it felt important a few weeks ago to harvest even the damaged bunches, and to do something with them. Why not a rosé?
In fact, as I will write about next week, rosé might just be a bright part of of Rioja’s future.
