Winemaker Notes
Clean and bright with good intensity of color, cherry tonality with edging cherry. Elegant and complex, spices, ripe fruit well integrated in notes of smoke and toasted wood. Good balance, ripe tannin, with hints of spices and ripe fruit. Long and round with hints of toasted hazelnut.
Pair with any kind of meat. It matches with grilled or fried potatoes, mushrooms or ham. Also pairs with oily fish such as tuna or code, medium-aged cheese and berry dessert.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Fully ripe black-fruit aromas suggest prune and raisin, especially as this warm-year Tempranillo breathes and expands. A smacking palate with hard tannins is drying, while raspberry, blackberry and cassis flavors are full and ripeness. Drink through 2025.
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.