All wine regions tend to be stereotyped to a certain degree – and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If a region has managed to get its name associated with, say, aromatic whites or sparkling wines or powerful spicy reds, that can give it a head start at the local supermarket or restaurant.

As customers, we feel as though we know what we’re getting from Rías Baixas, or Champagne or the Barossa Valley, almost to the point where the producer’s name becomes secondary, a stamp of quality rather than style.

Rioja has always been one of the most tightly defined wine regions – a place with a strong vinous identity to which people are drawn because they feel as if they know what to expect. Say the word Rioja and most of us will conjure up a palate-picture of a red wine that can be summed up with a familiar list of descriptors: mellow, soft, coconut, vanilla, savoury, mature. We can also link those words to a particular set of winemaking inclinations: American oak barrels, long pre-release ageing, the Tempranillo grape variety.

Stereotype, caricature, brand identity – call it what you will, but it has served Rioja well over the years. The Rioja name regularly ranks among the top handful of the world’s most recognised wine regions in tests of consumer knowledge, whether it’s an extensive survey by the wine industry’s leading market research firm or a more informal measure such as Rioja’s name being deemed famous enough by confectioners to appear on packets of wine gums.

But there is a very significant downside to the strong identification between Rioja and a single style of wine or school of winemaking: it fails properly to represent what has been going on in the region over the past