Winemaker Notes
Viña Alberdi is characterized by a notable food-pairing versatility. It is an ideal companion to appetizers, snacks and barbecues, perfect with rice, pastas and stews, and great with lightly-grilled meat and fish.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Dried red cherries, paprika, coconut, dried strawberries and earth. Medium body, steely and subtle tannins and a red plum-soaked, medium-chewy finish. Drink in 2021.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The first wine in their portfolio is already at Reserva level (labeled Crianza in Spain...), of which I tasted the 2014 Viña Alberdi. 2014 was a challenging harvest with lots of rains, and they had to sort and select the grapes. The wine has plenty of balsamic and smoky notes, incense and cigar ash, smoke and spice. The palate is quite marked by the élevage of two years in barrel and reveals a medium-bodied wine with a bitter twist on the finish, and the balsamic notes that you find on the nose make a comeback in the finish. This seems to be a lighter vintage of Viña Alberdi.
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.