Winemaker Notes
Made with Tempranillo and Garnacha varieties, El Andén de la Estación is a modern wine that ages in oak barrels for 14 months.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Cask-aged for 14 months, the 2022 El Anden De La Estacion is a youthful, approachable blend of 65% Tempranillo and 35% Garnacha, the first one made in 2016. Fermented using indigenous yeast, it’s left on the lees to soften the texture and accentuate the red and black cherry and berry fruit. It’s quite delightful and impressively well-made for the price point, full-bodied but balanced.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The red 2022 El Andén de la Estación comes from their earliest harvest ever. They define it as a modern blend of Tempranillo with 30% Garnacha fermented in stainless steel and concrete. It has good ripeness and 14.5% alcohol, notes of cassis, licorice and black berry fruit, with a touch of smoke, toast and spice that is quite integrated. It's juicy and young and has a medium to full-bodied palate with abundant, slightly dusty tannins that give it an earthy touch. It's serious despite being approachable, a wine for the by-the-glass and gastronomy markets. It keeps the poise despite the warm and dry conditions from the year. This is produced in a separate winery they bought in Labastida, the first year it was produced there.
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Wine Spectator
Hints of espresso, smoke and tobacco are a savory underpinning that adds dark detail to flavors of baked black cherry and blackberry fruit in this well-meshed, thickly textured red, with chewy tannins. Tempranillo and Garnacha. Drink now. 7,000 cases made, 4,000 cases imported.
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.