Winemaker Notes
Serve with red meats, game and cured cheeses.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2006 Especial Reserva spent 24 months in French oak. Deep purple in color, it offers up an alluring bouquet of earthy minerality, cigar box, rose petal, Asian spices, and blackberry. Medium-bodied, savory and well balanced...
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Wine Enthusiast
Dense and roasted on the nose, with tobacco, leather, mild herbal notes and blackberry fruit. The palate is packed but a little bulky, with smacking flavors of plum, blackberry, pepper and herbs. Finishes with leather and heat.
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.