Winemaker Notes
The 2016 Prado Enea Gran Reserva has a blackcherry color with medium depth. On the nose one finds an elegant collection of forest fruit (blackberries) with spices like cloves and cinnamon. It has a silky-smooth attack with medium body and a very long, pleasant passage through the mouth. Velvety tannins in perfect harmony with its fresh and well-integrated acidity. Creamy and vanilla notes mingling with fresh fruit.
This wine pairs well with casseroles, meat dishes, fish and cheese; and it can even be enjoyed on its own, without any accompaniment.
Professional Ratings
-
Jeb Dunnuck
Spiced red and black fruits, new saddle leather, smoky tobacco, and lead pencil are just some of the nuances in the 2016 Prado Enea Gran Reserva, a pure, medium to full-bodied, flawlessly balanced, beautifully textured Rioja from this team. With beautiful yet building tannins, a pure, focused style, and awesome length on the finish, it's a brilliant wine with a solid two decades of prime drinking ahead of it.
-
James Suckling
Complex aromas of dark fruit with violets, walnuts and chocolate. Classy. It's full-bodied with plush yet fine velvety tannins, and a precise and pointed finish. Juicy and savory. Tight finish. It's very long. This is beautiful now but will be even better in three or four years. Linear and vertical at the same time. Try after 2026.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The expressive, complex and nuanced 2016 Prado Enea Gran Reserva is a textbook traditional Rioja in the making. 2016 was a very elegant year, with aging potential, volume and very good acidity and freshness. It's full-bodied but fine-boned, has 14.5% alcohol, a pH of 3.6 and 5.25 grams per liter acidity. It has terrific balance, with all the components in the right proportion to age superbly in bottle. They have also been working on the selection of wood used. This wine matured in French and American oak barrels for three years, and the oak is super integrated.
Rating: 97+ -
Wine Enthusiast
Deep ruby in color, this wine has a nose of cocoa powder, coffee bean, lavender and cherry. It is smooth at first sip, with tannins that slowly build in volume and then drift away to reveal black cherry, blackberry, chocolate, mint and orange-zest flavors. The brilliant finish is marked with a floral note.
Cellar Selection -
Vinous
Aged in barrel for 36 months, the 2016 Gran Reserva Prado Enea is a blend of Tempranillo, Garnacha, Mazuelo and Graciano from Rioja Alta. This dark garnet wine reveals thyme, plum and sour cherry notes, accompanied by reductive nuances of matchstick and saffron. Additionally, it displays hints of biscuit, wax and dried flowers. On the palate, it is dry, supple and chalky, with a juicy, energetic flow that leads to a long-lasting, complex finish. While the leaner style brought on by the cold vintage may appear slightly unsubstantial for Prado Enea lovers, it remains absolutely delicious.
-
Wine Spectator
A powerful red that nonetheless shows poise and fine integration, wrapping a core of dense tannins around focused flavors of baked black plum, green olive, fig cake and ground coffee, with a savory underpinning of loamy earth, leather and leafy herb notes. Plush in texture and appealing, with a long, well-spiced finish.
-
Decanter
Released in Autumn 2023, this is a sturdy, brooding beast, near obsidian in colour and with a precocious aromatic dominated by tobacco, toasty oak and a beguiling combination of balsamic vinegar and bilberry jam. Frighteningly youthful, an impression confirmed by the rigour of the structure; firm acidity and muscular tannins to the fore, but nothing gets in the way of the quality and power of the dark fruit core which captures the essence of this gloriously idiosyncratic wine in a strong vintage such as this.
Bodegas Muga is a family firm founded in 1932 by Isaac Muga and Aurora Caño. The first wines were made in an underground cellar, until in 1968 they decided to set up their own winery in a beautiful old 19th-century town-house situated in the city of Haro. The Bodegas Muga outstanding feature is that it always uses the finest materials, combining tradition with the latest advances in winemaking so as always to give its wines the very best quality without losing authenticity. Indeed, it is the only wine cellar in Spain which employs its own master cooper and coopers, who make all the vats for the cellar as well as the oak casks. The winery remains true to traditional winemaking methods such as racking the casks by gravity and fining the wine with fresh egg whites. Bodegas Muga has succeeded in combining the purest family tradition with an updated vision of the future which has allowed them to preserve their own personality and character.
Hailed as the star red variety in Spain’s most celebrated wine region, Tempranillo from Rioja, or simply labeled, “Rioja,” produces elegant wines with complex notes of red and black fruit, crushed rock, leather, toast and tobacco, whose best examples are fully capable of decades of improvement in the cellar.
Rioja wines are typically a blend of fruit from its three sub-regions: Rioja Alta, Rioja Alavesa and Rioja Oriental, although specific sub-region (zonas), village (municipios) and vineyard (viñedo singular) wines can now be labeled. Rioja Alta and Alavesa, at the highest elevations, are considered to be the source of the brightest, most elegant fruit, while grapes from the warmer and drier, Rioja Oriental, produce wines with deep color, great body and richness.