Winemaker Notes
Garnet red in color. Delicate nose, with good reduction and toasty notes aongslide rich licorice flavors and mountain herbs in this generous red. Elegant and fresh palate, with well-integrated tannins and a smooth finish.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 San Vicente showcases the completeness of the year with a rare combination of power and elegance, with intensity of fruit, clout and very good freshness and the roundness of the tannins from the year. It has a lot of everything; the selection of Tempranillo used for this wine gave a lot of color, notes of aromatic herbs and ripe berry fruit and a solid palate, but it's fine-boned, with a beautiful texture. It's still young but already shows incipient complexity. It absorbed the new oak (French and American) pretty early, and the aromas and flavors are very integrated. It should be very long lived. This is one of the finest vintages for San Vicente.
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Wine Spectator
A muscular red, offering an initially compact feel that then opens nicely in the glass and on the palate, revealing a concentrated range of ripe black currant and black cherry fruit, with a fleshy hint of green olive, plus fragrant thyme, rosemary, licorice and mineral accents. Framed by limber tannins that firm the fresh, focused finish. Best from 2026 through 2041.
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.