Recently returned from a trip to Rioja. It is a fantastic place to visit, with beautiful scenery, friendly people, delicious 3 hour lunches and tasty wine. Here are some things that I learned.

1. Rioja has the best wine bars. At almost any bar you go to in the towns of Rioja, there are lots of folks, often with their whole families, drinking glass after glass of fresh, tasty Rioja with excellent tapas. A glass is rarely more than 2 euros. We need this kind of thing in New York.

2. Large factories can sometimes produce acceptable commercial products. Interesting wine can only be made on a small scale by dedicated artisans. This is something that we all kind of know. But after seeing both large and small in Rioja, the connection between artisanship and what you get in the bottle has never seemed clearer to me. Big places just have too much juice to keep track of. They need to take short cuts to get stuff done. They have to meet production quotas and will get fired if a fermentation is blocked. There is no incentive for them to take risks. And they just don’t have enough people around who really feel passion for the end result.

3. There is a lot of great wine in Rioja. Aside from some of the obvious names, please check out the wines from Pecina. The wine-maker worked for years at La Rioja Alta, a great bastion of traditional Rioja. At Pecina, a fairly new winery, this guy is trying to preserve all the great traditions of La Rioja Alta, but is producing on a much smaller scale (see point 2 above). The results are magnificent. Natural yeast, no manipulation, etc., etc. Incredible stuff.