Winemaker Notes
This wine is spectacular, and represents the perfect foil for grilled steak. Rich, full bodied and muscular, Alto Moncayo has riveting intensity and palate staining extract; this Spanish red is inky/purple, full-bodied, and rich. This pedal-to-the-metal offering should age handsomely for a decade.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The eponymous 2015 Alto Moncayo is a ripe, powerful and concentrated old-vine Garnacha thathas 16% alcohol and matured for 20 months in brand new oak barrels, 65% French and the rest American. With that description, you can immediately guess the profile of the wine: a juicy, chewy, ripe and concentrated red with plenty of oak aromas and flavors. I found it fiercely oaky and balsamic, still very young and a little raw, in need of a good couple of years in bottle to calm down. It has a creamy character, with a lactic hint, a full-bodied palate and plenty of tannins
Spanish red wine is known for being bold, heady, rustic and age-worthy, Spain is truly a one-of-a-kind wine-producing nation. A great majority of the country is hot, arid and drought-ridden, and since irrigation has only been recently introduced and (controversially) accepted, viticulture has sustained—and flourished—only through a great understanding of Spain’s particular conditions. Large spacing between vines allows each enough resources to survive and as a result, the country has the most acreage under vine compared to any other country, but is usually third in production.
Of the Spanish red wines, the most planted and respected grape variety is Tempranillo, the star of Spain’s Rioja and Ribera del Duero regions. Priorat specializes in bold red blends, Jumilla has gained global recognition for its single varietal Monastrell and Utiel-Requena has garnered recent attention for its reds made of Bobal.