Winemaker Notes
It can be paired with grilled red meat and grilled rock-dwelling fish.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A linear and super-fine wine with black cherry and berry character and hints of flowers. Full body yet very tight and closed. Beautiful texture.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
I had the chance to taste two vintages next to each other of the "special selection" red, the younger of which was the 2012 Selección Especial. It's from a dry and warm year where the canopy management and the absence of cover crop resulted in a fresher wine than anticipated. This is always a blend of Tempranillo, Garnacha, Graciano and Mazuelo, usually from older, poorer terraces and older vines, fermented in oak vats and aged in new barriques and then racked to neutral, used barrels. There was a small crop but they harvested late (they tend to have their vineyards in cooler zones), and they saw rains at the end of the harvest, so they didn't produce Torre Muga or Prado Enea, and they even produced less of this. It has perfect ripeness, aromas of spices and noble woods. It has a polished, sleek palate with fine tannins and good freshness. This is very good within the context.
Rating: 92+ -
Wine Enthusiast
This opens with heavy, earthy blackberry aromas, seeming chunky. The potent palate is saturated with beefy plum and blackberry flavors, which remain at full volume into the finish. Drink through 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.