Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2004 Prado Enea Gran Reserva is not quite as dense as the 2005 but is more expressive on the nose and rounder on the palate. It is a complete effort that should prove to be one of the best Prado Eneas Muga has produced.
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Wine Enthusiast
Exemplary Gran Reserva Rioja blending modernity with the best traditions of this famed region. Perfumed, lush and complex to start, then vibrant in the mouth, with excellent integration of flavors, acidity and tannins. Tastes of fine tobacco, mulled blackberry, chocolate and dry spices. Proper as the textbook calls for but individual as well. Cellar Selection.
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James Suckling
So fresh and tight with dried berries, plums and spice. Some orange peel. Medium to full body. Racy and crisp. Drink now.
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.