Bodegas Emilio Moro
Ribera del Duero, Spain
Bodegas Emilio Moro
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"It has never had anything but its mother's milk."
Alberto Medina Moro said it the way you would state the weather, standing over a fire made of vine cuttings. The lamb chops were the size of two fingers. The fat had gone translucent and was dripping into the sarmientos and coming back up as smoke, and the smoke smelled like the vineyard we had walked that morning, because it was the vineyard we had walked that morning. Every winter the vines get pruned, and the cuttings go under the lamb. Nothing about this is presented to visitors as tradition. It is just how the fire gets lit. That was hour one of a lunch that ran five.
The morning of our visit started in the Valderramiro vineyard, planted in 1924, and that is where anyone should start here. The vineyard is low bush vines with no wire and no trellis, and the trunks on the oldest of them are as thick as a person’s waist and go off at angles that look arthritic. I have walked Bechthold in Lodi, planted in 1886, and Nacional at Quinta do Noval in the Douro, two and a half hectares of ungrafted vines that have produced a handful of the greatest bottles ever made. Standing in Valderramiro I thought about both. Not because the wines resemble each other. Because all three are small pieces of ground that outlived every economic argument for clearing them, kept by families who could not bring themselves to do the sensible thing. You cannot photograph any of them well. They come out of the earth looking like debris. Then you taste what comes off them and the argument ends.
This ground sits above 750 meters. The days are punishing and the nights drop hard, and that swing is the entire reason Tinto Fino works here and nowhere much else. Tinto Fino is Tempranillo, but not the Tempranillo most people have had. The berries are smaller, the skins thicker, the clusters looser. More skin against less juice means more of everything, which is why Ribera del Duero spent two decades being turned into wines that punched you in the mouth.
The Moros went the other direction, and they had the material to do it. Valderramiro in 1924. Resalso in 1932, the year the second Emilio Moro was born. Sanchomartín in 1964. When they later replanted across what is now more than 200 hectares, they did not order clonal material from a nursery. They took wood off their own old vines. The entire estate is a genetic copy of the parcels you can still stand in.
That is what those thick, ugly, magnificent trunks actually are. Not a heritage exhibit. The source code.
We then sat on a beautiful veranda above overlooking the vineyard and Alberto, the fourth generation, opened bottles of Godello from the family's Bierzo project talking about his family, the land and its people. His uncles José and Javier are the third. His great-grandfather was born in 1891 in that village and his grandfather in 1932 in that village, and he tells it with the specific flatness of someone who has never once considered that it might be a marketing asset.
Then the working winery, and then that fire. The lunch is the part I would sell you if I were selling anything. This was a table that saw generations before us, and Alberto and his family embraced us like family. The wine kept coming and the conversation left wine within the first hour and never really came back. By hour three there was no visible line between the people who own the place and the people who run it. By hour five I understood why the wines taste the way they do.
Spain has always had producers who named wines for the land instead of the label, and in Ribera del Duero the Moros were early to make that the organizing principle of the house. They name wines after pieces of ground and leave each one in barrel for as long as it needs. In 2003 the Spanish government wrote that logic into law with Vino de Pago, a category built entirely around single estates and the ground beneath them. The Moros had been working that way for years by then, and they were doing it because of what they had watched their grandfather refuse to pull out of the earth.
A private visit to Emilio Moro through Vineyard Confidential is that day, not the tasting-room version of it. You walk Valderramiro and put your hands on trunks that predate the Civil War. You go into the old cellar underground before you see anything modern. You sit on the veranda with a member of the family while he tells you about his great-grandfather. And then you eat lechazo cooked over the prunings of the vines you walked, for as long as the afternoon holds, at a table where the cellar crew sits down with you.
From the Cellar
Finca Resalso, Emilio Moro
Named for the vineyard planted in 1932, the year the second Emilio Moro was born, this wine broke the rules of Ribera del Duero when it arrived in 1994 as the first young red in the region to see oak. Four months in French barrel, just enough to round it and never enough to disguise it. Red cherry and blackberry with the concentration Tinto Fino gives whether or not you ask for it, and it is the bottle Ribera opens next to lamb off an open fire.
Tempranillo, Emilio Moro
The wine that carries the founder's name, first bottled with the 1989 vintage, the winery's first under the DO. Twelve months in oak brings dark cherry and plum, dried herb, and a graphite edge underneath, with the wood sitting behind the fruit rather than over it. Every vine that goes into it was grafted with wood cut from the family's oldest blocks, Valderramiro planted in 1924 and Resalso in 1932, farmed above 750 meters.
Godello, Emilio Moro “Polvorete”
From El Bierzo, granite at the top of the slopes and slate below, with vineyards climbing past 750 meters. Fermented in stainless steel with no oak, it is fresh and easy to drink but full of nuance, white flowers and citrus pith over a saline line that runs the length of the palate. The winery calls it their most rebellious wine, and it is built for a summer table with friends.