Winemaker Notes
Clean and bright with a medium robe and a ruby-red color. On the nose it is complex with aromas of red fruits, sweet spices with a balsamic background. After a powerful attack the sensation of soft, supple volume gradually extends across the palate for a creamy finish. The aftertaste reminds you of the red berry fruit mingled with hints of wild herbs.
In Rioja this wine is enjoyed with one of our most notorious and simple dishes: Patatas a la riojana, a hearty potatoes and chorizo-based stew. It is a great wine for Sunday roast, stews, goose or turkey.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Real elegance here, with some vanilla, sweet spices, tobacco, plums and dark cherries on the nose. This is juicy, with lots of berries on the medium-bodied palate, following through to a tight, slightly chewy finish that will melt down in a year or two. Drinkable now, but better in 2024.
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine has a bouquet of cassis and aniseed. Dark-berry flavors mingle on the palate with firm tannins and notes of milk chocolate, dried herbs and coffee bean. A tight wall of tannins slowly drifts off into a vanilla-scented finish.
Best Buy
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.