My Round: Richard Ehrlich returns to his first wine love - Rioja

When I began to be seriously intrigued by wine, around 15 years ago, I took to Rioja like a cat to a chicken leg. Its solidity, food-friendliness and the unmistakable vanilla-and-coconut scent of American oak all suited me just fine. As I became more knowledgeable, and spread my glass more widely around the wine globe, I began to notice that a fair bit of Rioja had two shortcomings. One, the American oak tended to dominate the other flavours. Two, the underlying fruit was often deficient in some way: not enough of it, marred by unwholesome off-flavours or oxidation, and generally just undefined and shapeless.

I now know that these wines were made using fruit that had been poorly farmed or poorly handled in the winery. But many winemakers in Rioja would regard those flavours as "typical" of the regional style. And they would often have been right. For a long time, that didn't matter: with a large domestic market perfectly happy to drink those wines, they didn't have to clean up their act.

Then the New World happened. Cheaper wines were made for easy drinking using ultra-modern techniques and with few regulatory regimes, and the public got a taste for them. In Rioja, meanwhile, the regulations rule and the public doesn't always get the point. And why should they? When I visited the region late last year, one Riojano winemaker, a taster on the official panels run by the Consejo Regulador (Regulatory Council) enforcing the DOC rules, said, "We only look for defects. We don't look for virtues."

The hierarchical rules in Rioja are particular out of step with contemporary tastes. At the bottom of the hierarchy is "joven", young wine between a few months and two years old, and unoaked. Then comes "crianza", three years old with at least one year in oak and a few months in a barrel. Then "Reserva", at least three years old and with one of those in oak. And finally "Gran Reserva", which must spend two years in oak and then a further three in the bottle before release.

There are advantages in this strict regime, but there are also shortcomings. Hierarchies in wine confuse many consumers, who may think that the grandest name (and highest price) automatically equates to highest quality - when in fact it may mean a wine that's been overloaded with oaky richness. The taste of "classic" Rioja may be historically faithful, but that isn't necessarily a sign of quality. Agustin Santaolaya, of the very forward-thinking Roda winery, admits that: "In Rioja, for a long time we did things very badly."

But Santaolaya is proud to claim that "we are improving", especially in selection of clones of Tempranillo - the region's signature grape - as well as vineyard management and winemaking generally. Another winemaker said that there are "various ingenious ways of fiddling the regulations without compromising quality".

This isn't just a blinkered pursuit of "modernity" - or an obsessive pursuit of increased market share. During my trip to the region, I tasted wines from 10 wineries, and nearly all had found ways of working (roughly) within the rules while making stuff that wouldn't have been recognised as classic Rioja a decade ago. A few seem determined to remain traditionalists, but most seek what Víctor Charcán of Bodegas El Coto de Rioja called a "neoclassical" style: bringing the tradition forward rather than junking it completely.

I don't know what Rioja will look like in another 10 or 15 years. With the Spanish market shrinking, the producers will have to look increasingly to export markets. By that time, their targets will be people who don't know what tradition tastes like. I suspect that they'll be more interested in crianza and joven wines, two of which are highlighted here, than in the bigger Reservas. And will it matter? It certainly will in Rioja. Let's see how they go on adapting. s