Winemaker Notes
An intense bright cherry-red wine with lighter tawny hints. There is a concentration of aromas of ripe fruit and vanilla on top of spices and toasted bread. Balanced in the mouth, there is a powerful back palate and a long pleasurable finish to this elegant wine. It will open up and improve for hours in the glass. Great potential in the bottle.
Very good with roast meat, grills, duck in orange sauce, pork in mustard, mature and semi-mature cheese, venison in red wine, grilled wild mushrooms, casseroles, Iberian ham and so on.
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.