Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2001 Vinas de Gain (100% Tempranillo) is a fabulous effort for the price (one of the best buys in the marketplace). Aged in French oak casks (about 40% new) for 12-14 months, it boasts a deep purple color to the rim as well as a perfume of raspberries, blackberries, crushed stones, and white flowers. With extraordinary precision, definition, and finesse, great elegance, wonderful sweetness, medium body, and a gorgeously textured finish, it caresses the palate, offering considerable personality and overall symmetry.
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.