The Berones' Legacy

The label carries a line of text most people never read: our wines are the legacy of the Berones, the people who lived in La Rioja in the third century BC. The Berones were the Celtiberian tribe that held the upper Ebro before Rome arrived, and the name Beronia is a nod to them — chosen in 1973 by a group of friends from a txoko, one of the Basque gastronomic societies where members cook for one another, who wanted a wine of their own to drink with their dinners. The bodega they founded at Ollauri, in the high country of Rioja Alta, was bought within a decade by González Byass, the sherry house of Jerez, which has run it since without moving it from where it started.

The house style sits between the two schools of Rioja — neither the American-oak-and-long-ageing tradition of the old bodegas nor the French-oak modernism of the 1990s, but a deliberate blend of the two, with barrels made from American staves and French heads. The Reserva is the core of the range: Tempranillo with a portion of Graciano and Mazuelo, around a year and a half in barrel and another year or more in bottle before release, as the category requires.

2015

2015 was a warm year across northern Spain — a hot, dry summer, an early harvest, ripe fruit and soft tannins — and the Rioja regulatory council gave it the second-highest of its official ratings. It made Reservas that were approachable young, with more flesh than the cooler 2016s that followed, and it suited a house whose wines are built for the table rather than the cellar.

In the Glass

Opened at home, late on a summer night, at six years from the vintage — the least ceremonial bottle of that week, and none the worse for it.

The colour was a medium ruby with a hint of garnet beginning at the rim. The nose was classic Rioja in its modern-traditional register: ripe plum and black cherry, vanilla and coconut from the American oak, a dusting of cinnamon and clove, a leafy, tobacco-like note and a faint leather underneath.

The palate was medium-bodied, round and easy, the tannins soft and the acidity gentle, the fruit sweet in the middle and the oak fully integrated. A savoury finish of moderate length, with the spice returning at the end.

There was nothing here to puzzle over, which was the point. A Reserva from a generous year, at the age it was made for, on a night that wanted something warm and uncomplicated. Rioja at the other end of ambition is elsewhere in this archive — the Pagos de Viña Real 2004 from a single plot, and the Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva Especial 1970, the old school at fifty.