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.
Remelluri is one of the most timeless and iconic landscapes of the wine world, as well as one of the most enchanting vineyards in Spain. While firmly anchored in its historical past, Remelluri illuminates the path forward for not only the future of Rioja but also world-class, terroir-based fine wines produced in Spain. It is about rediscovering the essence of Rioja, and the story’s evolution is genuinely cinematic in scope. At Remelluri, the future lies in the past.
The estate’s origins date back to the tenth century when Count Erramel, a Basque warrior and aristocrat from Álava, founded a small village on the site (uri in Basque); hence the name Erramel Uri evolved to Remelluri. The first wines were made here in the fourteenth century. The modern winery was established in 1967 when Jaime Rodríguez Salís purchased the vineyards at the heart of the former estate and began to make wine from the ancient, abandoned site. Remelluri became the first single-vineyard Rioja of the modern era with its release of the 1971 vintage, standing out from a conservative wine culture based on house style and blends of purchased wines from throughout Rioja. Remelluri was founded on individuality and the concepts of terroir and specificity, always distinct from the industrial machine of greater Rioja.
Remelluri’s vineyards are located along the slopes of the Sierra de Toloño mountains, just above the village of Labastida in Rioja Alavesa. The vineyards here are at the highest elevation in the Rioja region with vines planted between 500 and 950 meters, south-facing, and protected from the prevailing northern winds and frost. The estate consists of more than 80 individual plots, all of which are vinified separately. One of the keys to the location’s significance is that the vines are planted in terraced amphitheaters following the contours of the mountainside, which shelters them from the harsh weather on the leeward side. This ideal location is why generations of inhabitants have sought shelter and farmed the site for centuries.
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.