Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2009 Fincas de Ganuza is mostly Tempranillo with some 10% Graciano, produced exclusively with the top half of the bunches, where the grapes achieve a different ripeness. The wine is fermented in oak vats with malolactic in new barrels (70% French, the rest American), where the wine matured for 26 months. This 2009 is open, ripe, aromatic and heady with some creamy oak, quite well integrated. The palate is soft and approachable, very drinkable already. 40,000 bottles.
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.