Winemaker Notes
2015 was atypical but gratifying at La Granja Nuestra Señora de Remelluri. The warm and abundant conditions created an environment where painstaking selection and assembly of the best plots in the different microclimates was essential. Waiting for perfect maturity plot by plot, with careful and respectful wine-making, production, and aging produced the property’s ideal wine in 2015.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is very spicy and intense, yet with subtle toasted oak and gorgeous fruit. Perfumed. Full-bodied and very layered with incredible fruit and length. So much spice at the finish. Wonderful length. So typical of wines from 20 or 30 years ago, but made in a modern and precise way.
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Decanter
Telmo Rodriguez has been winning deserved plaudits for his ethereal Garnachas, but here in the family winery he proves that he can tempt the best out of Tempranillo. In fact it's an enticing blend, even including some white grapes. They come together to form an elegant whole, alive with mulberries and notes of orange. There's a fine, firm finish. Well worth cellaring.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Granja Remelluri Gran Reserva is a blend of Tempranillo and Garnacha from their estate vineyards. It fermented with indigenous yeasts and matured in barrels of different origins and sizes for 27 to 29 months. The wine shows superb, an undated style of Gran Reserva, using grapes from the three different valleys they have in Remelluri to create their grand vin. It has a classical style, but the oak and the evolution is slower, and the texture shows more of the limestone from the soils. This probably has almost 20% Garnacha, which to Telmo was the grape that was always there in Remelluri, and the grapes were harvested very late.
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Wine Spectator
A graceful version that sneaks up on you while expanding on the palate. Leads with an elegant mix of baked cherry and currant fruit, sassafras root and singed orange peel notes, all trimmed by finely sculpted tannins, but there's firm focus and stuffing. Reveals layers of sweet tobacco, mocha, loamy earth and mineral details as this opens in the glass and lingers on the palate. Tempranillo, Garnacha and Graciano. Drink now through 2040. 800 cases made, 100 cases imported.
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.