Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The flagship 2005 Aro is composed of 70% Tempranillo and 30% Graciano sourced from Muga’s best and oldest vineyards. It is then aged for 18 months in new French oak. Purple/black in color, the wine’s legs ooze slowly down the glass. Aromas of toasty new oak, mineral, spice box, incense, and blackberry are followed by a muscular, backstrapping infant of a wine with huge fruit, flavor, and structure. Deep, layered, and nearly impenetrable, it will require a minimum of a decade of cellaring. Do not think of touching a bottle before 2015 and then enjoy it through 2030. It is a true vin de garde.
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Wine Spectator
This muscular red leads with oaky notes of smoke, coffee and dark chocolate that frame a rich core of plum, tobacco and savory herbs. There's powerful tannins, but the finish is clean and fresh. Let this unwind. Best after 2010. Tasted twice, with consistent notes. 250 cases made.
Bodegas Muga is a family firm founded in 1932 by Isaac Muga and Aurora Caño. The first wines were made in an underground cellar, until in 1968 they decided to set up their own winery in a beautiful old 19th-century town-house situated in the city of Haro. The Bodegas Muga outstanding feature is that it always uses the finest materials, combining tradition with the latest advances in winemaking so as always to give its wines the very best quality without losing authenticity. Indeed, it is the only wine cellar in Spain which employs its own master cooper and coopers, who make all the vats for the cellar as well as the oak casks. The winery remains true to traditional winemaking methods such as racking the casks by gravity and fining the wine with fresh egg whites. Bodegas Muga has succeeded in combining the purest family tradition with an updated vision of the future which has allowed them to preserve their own personality and character.
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.