Winemaker Notes
High layer of red-ruby color with hints of cherry. Very elegant on the nose, highlighting spicy and fine wood notes along with a touch of ripe fruit and licorice. A very broad wine on the palate with great structure, volume, and acidity still present. Very well integrated and polished noble tannin. It is a great wine, complex, long on the palate and with great potential for aging in the bottle. It is a wine with character and personality, persistent in the aftertaste.
Blend: 95% Tempranillo, 5% Graciano
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This dark ruby-colored wine offers a nose of black cherry, black currant, vanilla and anisette. Well balanced tannins and acidity support flavors of dark red berries, butterscotch, dark chocolate and a hint of violet. Luxurious tannins settle in and slowly dissolve into a lingering finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Viña Real Gran Reserva is a classical Rioja Alavesa blend of 95% Tempranillo with 5% Graciano from their own vineyards. It matured in new and used barrels for two years and was racked every four months and no less than three in bottle. It has 13.95% alcohol, a pH of 3.54 and six grams of acidity. This is a textbook Gran Reserva; perhaps this year it shows a faster evolution, with notes of olives, with hints of mint, ripe but with acidity. It has a polished palate with fine-grained tannins and a very pleasant tactile sensation. It's ready but should also last.
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Wine Spectator
Firm and well-knit, with flavors of baked black raspberry and plum, fresh earth and pretty accents of violet and licorice enmeshed with sculpted tannins. Long and firm on the spiced finish. Tempranillo and Graciano.
Owned by the CVNE family , Viña Real dates back to 1920. Today this winery is not only a winemaking pioneer in ageing Rioja Alavesa but a timeless brand that has always remained faithful to its roots, with authenticity and sincerity at the fore.
Ever since then, a meticulous balance between tradition and modernity has defined the shape and content of Viña Real.
2004 saw the inauguration of the new Viña Real winery in Laguardia, where the whole process takes place from receiving the grapes to dispatching bottled wines.
Rioja Alavesa grapes are at the very heart of this winery. The winery’s name was inspired by the proximity of its vineyards to the old Camino Real. Clinging to this same patch of earth and blending into the Cerro de la Mesa hill is a monumental 30,000-square metre vat: this is the Viña Real building, an iconic design built in 2004 that masterfully blends the construction into the Riojan terrain.
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.