Winemaker Notes
Intense red color with purple nuances. Nose of aromatic herbs, balsamic, black forest fruit and soft minerals. At once silky and powerful, well-integrated tannins and an infinite finish.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Finca Allende wines are back in the U.S., and 2015 is a fine vintage to debut this single-vineyard Tempranillo. Its ripe aromas suggest berry and prune, with floral highlights. Lemony acidity bolsters its warm, toasty blackberry and plum flavors. Agile in build, it shifts gears like a fine-tuned transmission.
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Wine Spectator
The 2015 Mingortiz is pure Tempranillo from an organically farmed vineyard in Briones that gives the wine its name. It was planted in 1964, a south-facing plot with limestone-rich soils at 515 meters altitude that give the wine length and elegance. The uncrushed grapes fermented in an oak vat after a six-day cold soak. Malolactic was in barrel, same as the élevage, which was in brand new French barriques and lasted 16 months. It's not a shy wine and hits the scales at 15% alcohol. It's ripe but harmonious, modern, clean and expressive, with the chalky tannins that give that serious mouthfeel. It should be long lived. 9,000 bottles were filled unfiltered and unfined in April 2017. Both this and Gamindez used to contribute to the blend of the red Allende.
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.