Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2007 Pagos Viejos is sourced from Artadi’s three best and most elevated vineyard sites, all planted to Tempranillo over 75 years of age. The wine was aged for 18 months in new French oak. It sports a superb aromatic array of toasty new oak, pencil lead, violets, incense, black cherry, and blueberry. Elegant, ripe, and velvety on the palate, it has superb depth and concentration, savory flavors, a firm structure, and a 45-second finish. Give it 6-8 years of additional bottle age and drink it from 2016 to 2032.
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.