Plenty of thoughts from our Purple pagers on the ageworthiness of rioja. See Rioja to last and Traditional rioja on the forum. I first met our new Spanish specialist Luis Gutiérrez in the most delightful of circumstances, at one of the most inspiring wine tastings I can remember. Last February he and his co-author Jesús Barquín assembled a wonderful, probably unrepeatable, collection of ancient riojas for us all to taste at the London home of Neil Beckett, editor of The World of Fine Wine. Vintages ranged back from 1982 to 1945 for the red wines and the six whites, mainly the famous Viña Tondonia, spanned 1973 back to...