Winemaker Notes
#53 Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2022
This Gran Reserva Prado Enea displays an attractive, deep, dense cherry-red color. A stylish nose of black fruits mingling with spices, gingerbread and licorice. The soft, supple entry on the palate leads to a sensation of gentle power and air-light volume underpinned by cashmere silky tannins, harmoniously balanced by fresh acidity. Creamy, vanilla notes come through in the finish with ripe fruit. This wine is tempting to drink now, but it will age well for years.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This dark-ruby wine offers a bouquet of ripe cherry and baking spices. Notes of clove and nutmeg transition to the palate alongside flavors of blackberry, cassis, chocolate-covered espresso bean, eucalyptus and violet. Luxurious tannins amble towards a lengthy finish.
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James Suckling
The blackberry, flower and dark chocolate aromas are very impressive. It's medium- to full-bodied with fine and linear tannins that run the length of the wine. Racy and polished. Silky and enticing texture. All here. Very drinkable but will be even better years ahead.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The most classical of their wines, the 2015 Prado Enea Gran Reserva is a blend of Tempranillo, Garnacha, Mazuelo and Graciano, mostly from Rioja Alta (Sajazarra, Cellorigo and Fonzaleche), but the Garnacha is from different plots in the zone of Tudelilla at high altitude. These grapes are always picked last, but the wine has a similar alcohol level as the rest, around 14.5% in a warm year like 2019. The modus operandi is similar to other of the top cuvées—harvested into 200-kilogram boxes, destemming, optical sorting and fermentation in small oak casks with indigenous yeasts. The élevage in this case is extended to 36 months, and the barrels are only 10% new. This is, year in, year out, my favorite wine from Muga, and in this powerful and ripe year, these late-harvesting vines ripened thoroughly and delivered a full array of aromas and flavors so that the wine has plenty of depth and complexity. It has a very classical profile, with incipient tertiary notes, perfumed, floral and rich, textured and beautifully balanced. They compare this 2015 with 2009 and 2005 in terms of style but with freshness in the style of 2001 and 2010. It's enjoyable but should also develop for a long time in bottle. One of the finest Prado Enea vintages.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2015 Prado Enea Gran Reserva comes from a hotter, riper vintage, but it shares similar gamey, exotic aromatics of red and black fruits, sappy herbs, flowers, leather, iron, and background cedary oak. Rich, medium to full-bodied, incredibly pure, and balanced, it has ripe, still present tannins, impeccable balance, and a great finish. This is a classic expression of this cuvée that can be enjoyed any time over the coming two decades or more.
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Wine Spectator
Well-tailored in an understated way, this harmonious red is plushly creamy on the palate, like fine cashmere, showing seamless integration of the sculpted tannins with finely detailed flavors of black cherry and black plum reduction, sandalwood, cedar, green olive, espresso crema and minerally smoke and iron. Long and lightly juicy on the refined finish. Tempranillo, Graciano, Mazuelo and Garnacha.
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.