Bodegas Muga Prado Enea Gran Reserva 2014
- JS
- W&S
- JD
- WS
Winemaker Notes
This Gran Reserva Prado Enea displays an attractive, deep, dense cherry-red color. The nose is immediately expressive and reveals seductive, complex aromas that are at the same time delicate and elegant. Subtle notes of creamy oak mingle with a wide range of red berry and black forest fruits together with notes of licorice and toast. The entry on the palate is gentle, followed by a medium-body with a silky, fleshy, round texture balanced by lovely freshness. With its ripe, polished tannins and good acidity, this Gran Reserva can be enjoyed today but should age beautifully over several years.
This wine pairs well with casseroles, meat dishes, fish and cheese and it can even be enjoyed on its own, without any accompaniment.
Critical Acclaim
All VintagesReally beautiful aromas of crushed blackberry, brambleberry, hazelnut, walnut and light coffee, following through to a full yet so reserved and polished body with fine, creamy-textured tannins. Fresh and exquisite finish. This is a much more refined and harmonic rendition of their classic wine. Three years in French oak from their own production. Very enjoyable now, but this will improve with age for a long time.
The Muga family got its start as winegrowers in Villalba, in the eastern mountains of Rioja Alta, where they still tend small parcels that provide some of their top selections, including Prado Enea. This wine ferments in large oak vats without added yeasts, then ages in mostly French oak barrels. Once bottled, it rests at least three years at the winery before release. Now seven years old, the wine’s luminous color seems to infuse its flavors, emphasizing mountain freshness rather than any overt acidity. Its red-fruit intensities range from boysenberry to cherry and cherry tomato, all of it layered into a texture that’s supple and complex. A classic with a long life ahead.
More toasted spice, leather, savory herbs, chocolate, and meaty, gamey notes emerge from the 2014 Prado Enea Gran Reserva, a pure, medium-bodied, reserved, incredibly elegant Rioja that's drinking brilliantly today. It picks up some minty, floral notes with time in the glass and is just brilliant on the palate, with no hard edges. I'd be thrilled to drink bottles any time over the coming 15+ years or so. Best After 2022
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.