Bodegas Muga

The Barrio de la Estación in Haro is one of the most concentrated collections of historic wine estates in the world. Within a few hundred metres of the railway station, the great traditional bodegas of Rioja Alta — López de Heredia, CVNE, La Rioja Alta, Roda, and Muga — stand side by side in a neighbourhood that was purpose-built for wine production in the 1880s and 1890s, when the phylloxera crisis in France created an insatiable demand for Spanish wine and the railway made it possible to meet that demand. The bodegas that established themselves in the Barrio in those years were building for the long term: large, stone-built cellars designed for the extended oak ageing that the Bordeaux merchants who were buying the wine demanded, and that the Rioja producers came to regard as the defining characteristic of their style.

Muga arrived in the Barrio in 1932, later than the grandes bodegas that had established themselves in the boom years of the 1880s, but with the same commitment to traditional methods. Isaac Muga had worked in the wine trade long enough to understand that the Rioja Alta's combination of altitude, clay-limestone soils, and Atlantic-influenced climate was capable of producing wines of genuine complexity and longevity — wines that rewarded the patience of extended oak ageing rather than being diminished by it. The bodega he built was designed around that conviction, and the conviction has been passed down through four generations without significant modification.

The cooperage at Bodegas Muga is the most visible expression of the family's philosophy, and the most unusual feature of any winery in Rioja. The team of coopers — there are typically four or five working at any given time — builds barrels from staves that have been air-dried for a minimum of two years, shapes them over an open fire in the traditional manner, and toasts them to Muga's own specifications. The process is slow, labour-intensive, and expensive; it would be far cheaper to buy barrels from one of the large cooperage groups that supply most of the wine world. The Muga family has never seriously considered doing so.

The barrels produced in the cooperage are used exclusively for Muga's own wines, and they are maintained and repaired in the cooperage for as long as they remain useful — which, for the large oak vats used for the Reserva and Gran Reserva wines, may be several decades. The oldest vats in the bodega date from the 1960s and are still in active use; they have been repaired and re-staved many times, but they retain the character of the original wood and the accumulated history of the wines they have held. This continuity — the same vessels, the same methods, the same family — is what gives Muga's wines their particular quality of consistency across vintages.

Muga's winemaking is defined by what it does not do as much as by what it does. The bodega does not use mechanical pumps to move wine between vessels — gravity and traditional racking are used instead, a method that is gentler on the wine but requires a cellar designed specifically for the purpose, with vessels at different levels so that the wine can flow downward from one to the next. The bodega does not use synthetic fining agents — the wines are fined with egg whites, a traditional method that clarifies the wine by binding to the tannins and settling them out, leaving the wine cleaner without stripping it of character. And the bodega does not rush the ageing process: the Reserva wines spend a minimum of two years in oak and one in bottle before release; the Gran Reserva Prado Enea spends three years in oak and three in bottle.

The grape varieties used at Muga reflect the traditional Rioja blend: Tempranillo is the dominant variety in all the red wines, complemented by Garnacha, Mazuelo (Carignan), and Graciano. The Graciano is particularly important to the Muga style — it contributes the freshness, the floral character, and the structural acidity that allows the wines to age gracefully over decades. The vineyards from which Muga sources its grapes are concentrated in the Rioja Alta, where the combination of altitude, Atlantic influence, and clay-limestone soils produces fruit of the structure and acidity that the traditional style demands.

Bodegas Muga is now in the hands of the fourth generation of the family — Jorge, Juan, and Manuel Muga, the grandchildren of Isaac and Aurora's son Isaac Muga Caño, who built the bodega's international reputation in the 1970s and 1980s. The transition between generations has been managed with the same deliberateness that characterises the winemaking: no sudden changes, no dramatic reorientations, no concessions to fashion that would compromise the integrity of the style. The wines that Muga makes today are recognisably the same wines that the bodega was making forty years ago — more refined, perhaps, and more consistent, but built on the same principles and expressing the same character.

The one significant addition to the Muga portfolio in recent decades is Torre Muga, a single-vineyard wine first produced in 1991 that represents the bodega's response to the international demand for a more concentrated, modern-styled Rioja. Torre Muga is aged in new French oak rather than the American oak used for the Reserva and Gran Reserva wines, and it is made in a style that is more immediately accessible than Prado Enea — richer, more extracted, more obviously influenced by the new oak. It is an excellent wine, and it has introduced Muga to a generation of drinkers who might not otherwise have sought out the traditional style. But it is Prado Enea that defines the bodega, and it is Prado Enea that the family regards as its most complete expression of what Rioja can be.