Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Vanilla and chocolate to the fresh black plums and blackberries. Juicy and tight on the palate with firm, lightly grippy tannins and lots of sappy fruit. Bright acidity. From organically grown grapes. Drink now or hold.
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Wine & Spirits
Youthfully green in its stemmy tannins, this wine’s red fruit wins out in the end, presenting those tannins with delicacy and lace over the raspberry and strawberry flavors. It feels refreshing, for lunch with a salad of duck confit.
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Wine Spectator
Fresh and harmonious, this appealing red is lightly spiced, with baked red and black cherry fruit, a hint of tobacco and a subtle underpinning of loamy earth. The finish is trimmed by light tannins. Drink now through 2029.
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.