Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Sourced entirely from CVNE’s vineyards in Villalba, this cuvée of Tempranillo with 10% Graciano and 5% Mazuelo is always great value, over- delivering on complexity and ageing potential. Refreshing and vigorous with silky tannins, subtle oak and textured blueberry fruit.
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Wine Enthusiast
Smoky, tight, gritty aromas of licorice, tobacco, cassis and berry are lively and ripped. This is layered and acidic, but also classy. Flavors of herbal red-berry fruits, coffee, herbs and licorice finish long and seamless.
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Wine & Spirits
The 2009 vintage turned this wine’s typically austere Rioja Alta style toward sumptuous richness. It has the fatness of a black mushroom and dark fruit ripeness, while the texture is sleek, with clean, modern lines.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2009 Imperial Reserva from a warm, ripe and powerful vintage, is still a project of a Reserva with its backward personality and its shy nose, displaying the toasty aromas of the barrique. It needs time to polish those tannins. Those who prefer more powerful wines would prefer this to the 2008. Drink 2015-2020.
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.