Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Wine Enthusiast
Opaque, with aromas of deep, tight fruit and toasty oak, this is a huge and fairly backward wine. However, the mouthfeel is very full—even viscous—and a rich range of cherry, cassis, toast and leather flavors grace the palate. It packs some intense tannins on the back end, making it a serious wine for the cellar, needing 5 to 8 years to come around. It should last for decades.
-
Wine Spectator
Rich yet lively, this full-throttle red fom Spain is bursting with ripe fruit and toasty oak flavors, yet retains a juicy acidity that keeps it balanced and refreshing to drink. It's concentrated yet graceful, with loads of potential.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 1996 Torre Muga is a fragrant offering with ample savory fruit. It appears to have fully evolved but is still quite structured.
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.