Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Slightly tarry and meaty edges here. Reductive and punchy blackberries and black cherries with crushed violets. Really impressive, fine but powerful tannins on the palate with peppery, blackberry flavors. Sexy juice.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The first wine to be released from what is surely their finest vintage to date was the 2016 La Bruja de Rozas, a blend from different plots in the village of Las Rozas de Puerto Real in the province of Madrid. I first had it at a restaurant and was simply blown away and ran to buy a few cases for my cellar. This is ethereal, weightless but powerful, intense, transparent, with beautiful aromatics and a silky texture, with the grainy minerality of the granite soils. It's long, pure, available and affordable. It has to be one of the best value wines found in Spain today. Drinkable, in fact, gulpable today, but with the potential to develop in bottle. Bravo, bravo and bravo!
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Wine & Spirits
This wine’s floral notes slowly emerge from under a dense layer of red fruit, its strawberry flavors deliciously ripe. It has the sharp tannins of garnacha grown in granitic soils, and a nervous and lively acidity that makes it ideal for pork chops.
Spanish red wine is known for being bold, heady, rustic and age-worthy, Spain is truly a one-of-a-kind wine-producing nation. A great majority of the country is hot, arid and drought-ridden, and since irrigation has only been recently introduced and (controversially) accepted, viticulture has sustained—and flourished—only through a great understanding of Spain’s particular conditions. Large spacing between vines allows each enough resources to survive and as a result, the country has the most acreage under vine compared to any other country, but is usually third in production.
Of the Spanish red wines, the most planted and respected grape variety is Tempranillo, the star of Spain’s Rioja and Ribera del Duero regions. Priorat specializes in bold red blends, Jumilla has gained global recognition for its single varietal Monastrell and Utiel-Requena has garnered recent attention for its reds made of Bobal.