Earlier this month, I visited the venerable Marqués de Murrieta at its palatial winery on the outskirts of Logroño. One of Rioja’s most critically acclaimed producers, Marqués de Murrieta is also a behemoth, making around one million bottles per year. During my visit, workers busily prepared for the harvest, readying nearly 50 tanks that will 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 2019). That focus on aging means, at any given moment, there are more than 4 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. 65,000 hectares of vineyards. 14,800 grape growers. More than 600 wineries churning out more than 270 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.

It’s no secret to say that Rioja—like many legacy regions—is dominated by its biggest players. Such massive scale has its positives: people all over the world know and respect the wines of Rioja. But in our current era, as bigness becomes less of a virtue—and when oak aging and powerful reds are less popular than ever—that grand reputation can be a liability. Even 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 taste, and a backlash against the status quo, has spawned an exciting new wave in Rioja (as we’ve covered here at NWR). This revolution of the younger generation 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. One new-wave winemaker bluntly told me, “We have to destroy this system and start over again.” But with the new wave representing only a small slice of such a large appellation, change comes very slowly.

This generational divide comes at a time when the traditional wine industry in Rioja is in crisis, with a number of large wineries on the verge of bankruptcy, and proposals to destroy surplus wine and to uproot up to 10,000 hectares of vines. You can feel the tension within the appellation as you travel around during harvest season.

All of which made me think about what an appellation even means anymore. In times like these, when the wine world is so divided on terms like classic, traditional, modern, and contemporary, is an appellation even necessary in 2024? With younger drinkers becoming more and more label conscious, will producers trump appellations?

I was still thinking about the worth of appellations, as I went to a fascinating tasting of tiny Rioja producers last week. This was the launch of a new organization, the Asociación Menudas Bodegas de Rioja, a group of 10 winemakers who produce less than 5,000 bottles per year. Yes, you read that correctly. 5,000 bottles is about 0.005 percent of what they make at Marqués de Murrieta in a year.

“We are very small wineries in terms of the amount we make, but nevertheless we have a very great spirit, and a love of wine that, as we say, widens the soul,” said Rufino Lecea, a former philosophy professor who is now the group’s treasurer, and runs the tiny Bodegas Reminde. “The idea of Menudas Bodegas is small wineries in quantity but they are able to do something big, something beautiful.”

All of the wineries are run by a single person, most of whom have day jobs. “We want to highlight this way of life and this contribution of value to the territory,” said Elena Corzana, another officer of the group. Corzana, who is one of my favorite winemakers in Rioja, makes only 4,000 bottles per vintage, and works as an enologist consulting in other parts of Spain. In Rioja, she’s known as a leader in bringing back a historic, obscure grape variety called Maturana Tinto.

“All our wineries are in the old houses of the villages, the old wineries,” she said. “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.”

All of 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 are invested in bridging the divide between the old and new styles. 

After the tasting, I spoke with one of the association members, Jairo Morga Manzanares, whose winery Bodegas Jairus makes only 1,000 bottles. Morga 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 says. “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 as many bottles. Morga 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 says.

Morga Manzanares believes it’s everyone’s job, big and small, to change this perception. “We all have to change the course in Rioja,” Morga Manzanares said. “Ours is just another vision of Rioja.”