Anson: Exclusive Macán vertical – Rothschild & Vega Sicilia’s joint project

Rothschild and Alvarez are hardly names that you want to announce to the estate agent if you’re looking to buy vines under the radar and for an honest market price.

So it’s not surprising that over the five years that Pablo Alvarez and Ariane de Rothschild were piecing together a full 170 different plots of old Tempranillo vines around Rioja Alavesa that their new neighbours believed they were dealing with a lawyer from Madrid.

Scroll down for Jane Anson’s Macán tasting notes and scores

The project was finally announced to the public in 2009, years after the two families had met over a dinner and begun to explore the possibility of working together, although the fist wines were not released to the market until 2013.

Partnership

Rioja was new for both families – Alvarez coming from Ribero del Duero where his family have owned the legendary Vega Sicilia since 1982, and Ariane and Benjamin de Rothschild coming from Bordeaux, where they own estates in Listrac and Montagne St Emilion – as well as an important share of Lafite Rothschild.

The Rothschilds had already launched a number of successful joint ventures; including the brilliant Rupert & Rothschild in South Africa. But this was the first partnership for Alvarez, making the stakes high for a man who has only ever been associated with excellence.

‘They knew there was a possibility of making something extremely special here with altitude and the terroir of Rioja,’ winemaker Gonzalo Iturriaga de Juan told me when I visited the estate in October 2019.

‘The criteria was that the vines had to have been planted at least in 1980 or earlier, to avoid the risk of buying lower quality over-productive clones that had been planted in Rioja in the 1980s and 1990s. They also had to be at an altitude of no less than 450m’.

Today they have a full 92ha of vines, entirely owned by the estate, on the border of Rioja Alta and Rioja Alavesa, ranging in size from 100m2 to 7ha.

My trip to Macán during harvest time was to see the stunning new winery that opened in 2015, and I met back up with Iturriaga de Juan at Château Clarke earlier this month (the drive is around four hours door to door from Rioja to the Médoc) to taste through more wines, and to set another few pieces of the puzzle into place.

Tasting

The vertical shows the fascinating steps that are needed establish a new estate and get to understand its terroir.

‘Tempranillo in Rioja is not the same as that in Toro or Ribero del Duero,’ says Iturriaga de Juan, who joined in 2015 and makes wines both here and at Vega Sicilia.

‘Extraction times, oak use, each element needs to be thought through from the beginning’.

The early days saw 100% new oak, which has now been reduced, and larger sized oak casks introduced. Things were a little uneven in the early years – my scores were 94, 91, 95, 91, 90 for the first five wines – showing vintage impact, and also their learning process.

But the desire to do things differently has been unchanged since the outset.

Macan doesn’t follow the usual Rioja system of Reserva and Gran Reserva and instead has a more Bordelais style of first wine and second wine, called Macan Classico.

And you feel the touch of Alvarez at every point – his obsessive pursuit of quality in the cellar for one, and vineyard decisions such as massal selection propagation from their oldest vines for any replanting.

The more recent vintages have far more consistency, and show just how close they are coming to making a project truly worth following.

See Jane Anson’s Macán tasting notes and scores

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