Winemaker Notes
This wine accompanies both hot salads with quail or bird, flakes, foi gras with reduced raspberry jam, as with lamb roasts and suckling pig. In general, pair this wine with anything as it is a very versatile wine.Blend: 70% Tempranillo, 20% Garnacho (notice the masculine use of Garnacha), 5% Graciano and 5% Mazuelo
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Traditional Rioja at its age-worthy best, the Tondonia red is a cuvée of Tempranillo with 20% Garnacha and 5% each of Graciano and Mazuelo. Leafy, gamey and sweet, with tangy acidity and a volatile lift. Drinking Window 2018 - 2025
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James Suckling
Lovely depth of fruit to this mature red with chocolate, dark tea and bark. Purple flowers and violets. Full and very silky and refined. A beautiful traditional wine to get to know. Drink now.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2005 Viña Tondonia Reserva is a blend of 70% Tempranillo, 20% Garnacho, 5% Graciano and 5% Mazuelo from their vineyards in the meander of the Ebro River, where they have some 100 hectares of vineyards. The wine fermented in the original oak vats that are now some 140 years of age. There is no temperature control and malolactic was also in the vat. The wine was transferred to oak barrels where it slowly matured in their deep, humid caves for no less than six years. After this, it was bottled unfiltered after being fined with egg whites. I think the quality gap between the Reserva and Gran Reserva has been getting smaller since the 2001 vintage and this 2005 is nothing short of exceptional. It's clean and complex, with more freshness. The wine is very spicy and with a palate that feels very balanced, livelier than in the past. It has a long finish where the flavors are clean. Easy to drink and very pleasurable. Some 250,000 bottles were produced in 2005.
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Wine & Spirits
Work your way past the bittersweet-chocolate notes of oak and scents of dill and paprika, and you’ll find some freshness and richness to complement this wine’s maturity. Tondonia Reserva offers elegance rather than intensity or power, an aristocratic take on old-line Rioja.
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.