Winemaker Notes
Garnet red in color. Delicate nose, with good reduction and toasty notes aongslide rich licorice flavors and mountain herbs in this generous red. Elegant and fresh palate, with well-integrated tannins and a smooth finish.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Coming all from a massale selection of Tempranillo (Peludo Tempranillo) and aged 20 months in new barrique, the 2020 San Vicente is deep purple-hued and reveals a beautiful nose of cassis and assorted darker, almost blue fruits supported by classy oak, graphite, and crushed stone-like minerality. It's beautifully concentrated, medium to full-bodied, has fine tannins, and a great finish. This pure, clean, incredibly impressive Rioja will benefit from 3-4 years of bottle age and evolve for two decades.
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Vinous
If there is a wine that embodies the terroir-driven focus since the 1990s, it's San Vicente. The 2020 San Vicente is 100% Tempranillo Peludo, distinguished by its velvety leaves. Sourced from the San Vicente vineyard in the Canoca Valley, San Vicente de la Sonsierra, it aged for 20 months in French (90%) and American (10%) oak barrels. This purplish wine offers ripe black fruit aromas and wild herb notes against an oak backdrop. Dry, juicy and taut, the light and fine-grained tannins linger long. A nuanced, modern Rioja, this wine is a masterpiece of Marcos Eguren's winemaking technique—a truly elegant Tempranillo.
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James Suckling
A plush, complex Rioja with powdery tannins that coat the palate nicely. Deep nose with lots of blackberries, Mexican chocolate, iodine and fine spices. Excellent quality and quantity of tannins that melt away with the ripe but fresh fruit. Very long and tight but really silky.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The only wine produced here since 1991 is the San Vicente, from a single 18-hectare vineyard planted in 1985 with Tempranillo Peludo, Finca La Canoca. The 2020 San Vicente had a traditional vinification, destemmed grapes fermented for nine days with pumping over twice per day and a maceration of 22 days. It matured in new barrels (90% French and 10% American) for 20 months, including malolactic. It has 14.1% alcohol and a pH of 3.59 with 5.6 grams of acidity, but the warmer year is noticeable in the aromas—it has riper fruit and possibly a little more development, like it's going to age a little faster. It's more Mediterranean, with notes of aromatic herbs and spices...
Rating: 93+ -
Wine Spectator
There's a sense of poise to this harmonious red, with creamy tannins well-meshed with a lovely range of plum sauce, ripe black cherry, tea leaf, ground anise and white pepper notes. Fresh and focused, with a lingering finish. Drink now through 2035. 4,000 cases made, 750 cases imported.
At a time when Rioja producers were entrenched in a classic style of production, Marcos and Miguel Angel Eguren strove to produce a Bordeaux styled single vineyard wine. The tradition in Rioja was blending vineyard and varieties, which lost the identity of single vineyards in the resulting wines. Marcos and Miguel Angel selected one of their finest and most unique vineyards, Finca La Canoca, to produce San Vicente. Located in a tiny valley at the foothills of the Sierra Cantabria, Finca La Canoca is 100% Tempranillo Peludo planted on extremely high-density trellises. The specific clone of Tempranillo, combined with the vineyard’s location produced a different expression that the Eguren family sought to highlight in this wine, that was built from the vineyard. The vineyard is located in a tiny valley on the northern fringes of what is considered to be an acceptable location for growing grapes in Rioja Alavesa. Any closer to the Sierra Cantabria mountain range, and the grapes would have trouble ripening. However, the altitude produces an elegant, lively wine with deep character and concentration.
In 1991, when they began working on the project, there were no single vineyard Rioja wines. The Eguren family were the first to combat this outdated ageing system, as there is nothing inherent about ageing that makes wine better. San Vicente is a unique wine which marries the modern intensity of fruit and concentration with classic Old-World style Rioja aromatics of mountain herbs and licorice.The philosophy of this project is one vineyard, one cellar, one wine.
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.