Winemaker Notes
Intense cherry-red color with violet glints. Clear and bright. Wild berries, spices and well-integrated oak. Wild and complex red with palate-tingling acidity, chalky freshness and flavors of plum and damson embellished by stylish French barrel notes.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2016 Norte is named after the orientation of the plot of its Tempranillo grapes grow. I visited the vineyard, one of the higher-altitude vineyards in Rioja Alavesa, at around 720 meters above sea level, right next to the mountain. It's a wild and windy place where they suffer the attacks of wild boars and deer, a place where the vines are healthy and the grapes ripen quite a lot but keep very good acidity. It's a powerful wine, as this vintage saw perhaps some 30% new barrels for the élevage that lasted 14 months. It's a ripe and powerful, still marked by the oak, but the palate is not hard; the tannins are quite polished, and there's refreshing acidity that keeps it very balanced. This is a modern red Rioja with stuffing and balance to develop nicely in bottle. It opened up in the glass, developing some floral aromas and further complexity, showing more integrated. This was first bottled in 1999, the second vintage of the winery.
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James Suckling
Lots of elderberry reduction, vanilla and smoke here. Full-bodied and very concentrated, but drawing on enough tangy acidity and structured tannins to pull this through.
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.