Winemaker Notes
Pair with red meats, lamb and grilled rockfish.
Blend: 70% Tempranillo, 20% Garnacha, 7% Mazuelo, 3% Graciano.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Fruit-focused red, with strong aromas of ripe blackberries, red plums and gently complex earthy and spicy notes. There’s energetic, ripe dark and red fruit on the palate. Silky and crisp with fine tannins, giving a velvety and chalky texture. Upbeat and succulent finish. Drink or hold.
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Jeb Dunnuck
A wine that won't be released on the market until next year, the 2014 Muga Reserva Selección Especial checks in as a blend of 70% Tempranillo, 15% Garnacha, 10% Graciano, 5% Manuelo. With an inky black color and loads of black fruits, charcoal, lead pencil, and espresso aromas and flavors, it's medium to full-bodied, has slightly more acidity than the 2012, as well as more tannin. It's a balanced, pure, beautiful expression of Rioja. It’s going to benefit from short-term cellaring and keep for 15-20+ years.
Rating: 93+ -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Muga family is a lot happier about 2014 than your average Riojano, and the 2014 Selección Especial shows why. Through a selection of the vineyards and longer aging in barrel, this is a more-polished wine, very good with food (it's the one winemaker Jorge Muga usually has when he drinks one of his wines with a meal). There is very good acidity here, which is why I think this is so good with food. I really see that vintages produced from the higher-altitude, cooler places in Rioja where the Muga family sources their grapes are different from other parts of Rioja, and this 2014 is one of the finest and most balanced of the recent vintages of Selección Especial. 200,000 bottles produced. It was bottled in February 2017.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2014 Muga Selección Especial Rioja is an impressive wine. TASTING NOTES: This wine delivers power with style. Its aromas and flavors of ripe fruit, oak, and blackberry are endless and beautiful. Pair it with a well-seasoned Porchetta. (Tasted: March 6, 2019, San Francisco, CA)
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Wine Spectator
A dense texture carries ripe flavors of blackberry, currant, licorice and toast in this modern-style red. Bright acidity and firm, slightly grippy tannins keep this focused. A bit angular now, but should smooth out with time. Best from 2020 through 2030.
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.