Winemaker Notes
Blend: 90% Tempranillo, 10% Graciano
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Top white Rioja in a more international style, made with cold soak and ageing in new French oak, but built on quality Viura and Malvasía grapes from old vineyards. Delicious, multi-layered, a benchmark.
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Wine Spectator
This big red is deep and focused, delivering fresh black cherry and plum flavors backed by licorice, tobacco and loamy earth notes, with firm, well-integrated tannins giving way to a floral and smoky finish. Drink now through 2025.
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine's rubbery latex, briary plum and berry aromas are potent. Its plum, berry and vanilla flavors finish with shrill acidity, hard, choppy tannins and long-lasting dark berry notes. Drink through 2028.
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.