Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
100% Tempranillo aged 14 months in American and French oak, the 2011 Reserva is an outstanding value showing beautiful black and red currant fruits, high-quality, unsmoked cigar tobacco, licorice and loamy soil undertones. Deep, medium to full-bodied, very pure, rich and concentrated, this is a gorgeous wine to drink over the next 3-4 years.
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Wine & Spirits
Youthful and bright, this wine’s plump cherry fruit fills its austere structure, with plenty of oak tannins to hold it in place. Unusually fresh for the vintage, relatively light, raspy and firm, this offers a hint of sweetness in the fruit to make the structure more accommodating. Decant it for meaty tapas.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
The 2011 Izadi Reserva is good drinking Rioja. Quite soft on the palate, this wine delivers bright red fruits, a touch of wood, and a note of minerality. Drinks well now with lightly grilled pork chops. (Tasted: November 11, 2016, San Francisco, CA)
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.