Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2009 Orben is unashamedly modern-styled, a little international, displaying notes of smoke and peat only the very best oak barrels are able to give. The fruit is ripe, more black than red, with plenty of spice aromas. The medium to full bodied-palate reveals a powerful wine with good concentration of flavors and abundant tannins in need of some time in bottle. The quality is very high but you’d need to wait to enjoy it at its best. Drink 2016-2020.
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Wine & Spirits
This needs age or plenty of air to show itself. The wine starts out reductive, with a burnt onion edge, but that disappears over the course of a day as the fruit-skin tannins begin to release hints of red berry flavor. Air encourages both the fullness and elegance of the wine to emerge, a smooth, lasting weave of black and red fruit.
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.