Winemaker Notes
A suave and impressively styled wine. Ripe, pristine dark cherries and chocolate on the nose lead into a carefully crafted luxuriously flavored palate. Complex and elegant with notes of herbs and spice. Fine tannins and understated oak.
Blend: 70% Tempranillo, 15% Graciano, 10% Garnacha,5% Viura
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Tasted as a sample of the final blend waiting to be bottled, the 2015 Phincas is from a challenging year when they had to move out of their old winery and David broke his foot during the harvest, so he didn't produce some of the wines. So, this has around 85% Tempranillo, 10% Graciano and the rest Viura from all the vineyards except La Revilla and El Vedao, the only single vineyards bottled separately that year. It has an intense balsamic nose of macerated herbs, acid berries and dark chocolate and is spicy but not oaky, with a fine palate with pungent acidity and great freshness. There are 5,000 liters of this that should make it into some 6,500 bottles after almost two years in used barrique and one year in oak vats. When I tasted the bottled wine, it had all the vermouth-like aromas and macerated herbs, and the palate felt quite balanced and with the freshness to develop in bottle.
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.