Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Cut from the same cloth as the 2013, with plenty of blue fruits, graphite, hints of chocolate, and lead pencil, the 2014 San Vicente is more broad, sexy, and layered, with ripe tannin and a great finish. It certainly has beautiful fruit.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2014 San Vicente is a single-vineyard Tempranillo from a specific clone of Tempranillo Peludo from a massal selection, matured in new oak barrels (90% French, 10% American) for 20 months. It's very balsamic, with plenty of incense and cigar box aromas, aromatic herbs, forest floor, cured meat and ripe black fruit aromas. The palate also has plenty of spicy flavors and an acid backbone that lifts it up.
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Wine Enthusiast
A blocked nose is toasty and charred, with requisite blackfruit aromas; but it’s slightly herbal and stalky as well. A tight stern palate is rubbing and tannin, while this tastes of blackberry, mocha and savory spices. Tobacco and mocha are the main flavors on a controlled finish. For a marginal vintage like 2014, this is a winner; drink through 2028. Jorge Ordonez Selections.
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Wine Spectator
This muscular red delivers plum and blackberry flavors, with smoke, tar, forest floor and anise notes. A bit clumsy but forceful. Solid tannins and balsamic acidity add to the structure. A big wine, and needs time.
At a time when Rioja producers were entrenched in a classic style of production, Marcos and Miguel Angel Eguren strove to produce a Bordeaux styled single vineyard wine. The tradition in Rioja was blending vineyard and varieties, which lost the identity of single vineyards in the resulting wines. Marcos and Miguel Angel selected one of their finest and most unique vineyards, Finca La Canoca, to produce San Vicente. Located in a tiny valley at the foothills of the Sierra Cantabria, Finca La Canoca is 100% Tempranillo Peludo planted on extremely high-density trellises. The specific clone of Tempranillo, combined with the vineyard’s location produced a different expression that the Eguren family sought to highlight in this wine, that was built from the vineyard. The vineyard is located in a tiny valley on the northern fringes of what is considered to be an acceptable location for growing grapes in Rioja Alavesa. Any closer to the Sierra Cantabria mountain range, and the grapes would have trouble ripening. However, the altitude produces an elegant, lively wine with deep character and concentration.
In 1991, when they began working on the project, there were no single vineyard Rioja wines. The Eguren family were the first to combat this outdated ageing system, as there is nothing inherent about ageing that makes wine better. San Vicente is a unique wine which marries the modern intensity of fruit and concentration with classic Old-World style Rioja aromatics of mountain herbs and licorice.The philosophy of this project is one vineyard, one cellar, one wine.
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.