Winemaker Notes
The Eguren family produce El Puntido Gran Reserva from a selection of higher altitude, sloped, and lower yielding parcels of the El Puntido estate vineyard. The wine is produced every vintage but in significantly varying quantities depending on the conditions of the vintage. All of the wines from El Puntido display a distinctly mineral, fresh, and savory character emanating from the limestone quality in the soil. This wine displays all of the savory and developed character expected of a great Gran Reserva married with the freshness, fruit, structure, and ageability of the great Gran Reservas of yesteryear.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
In contrast, the 2011 El Puntido Gran Reserva comes from a slightly cooler vintage, and it too is 100% Tempranillo from the El Puntido Vineyard. It has cooler red and black fruits as well as beautiful spice, leafy herb, chocolate, and tobacco notes. Medium-bodied on the palate, I love its overall balance, mid-palate depth, and length, and it's drinking brilliantly today, with another decade or more of overall longevity.
El Puntido is an old word meaning ‘staircase landing’, similar to the shape that these lands form between the Sierra de Cantabria and the Ebro River depression. The single vineyard wines of Viñedos de Páganos represent the terrain that the vineyards are planted on. These wines have been in production since 2001 and the Eguren family have achieved quality vintage after vintage and have even lowered the production and increased quality over the last 12 years. Viñedos de Páganos was founded with the goal of highlighting the elegant, mineral expression of El Puntido and La Nieta, two phenomenal single vineyards, located in the ancient medieval town of Páganos.
El Puntido and Calados Del Puntido are produced from El Puntido single vineyard. Calados Del Puntido is the entry level wine, from a higher yielding portion of the vineyard. The family considers El Puntido to be the paradigm of a mineral expression of Tempranillo, which is caused by the high proportion of chalk in the soils at this site.
The family strove to produce a world class wine from the miniscule Finca La Nieta, a vineyard with shallower, poorer soils, and a superior microclimate than the neighboring El Puntido vineyard. The product is Viñedos de Páganos’ flagship wine, La Nieta. The Eguren family wanted to use this vineyard to display the subtlety and elegance that Tempranillo can represent, and they have achieved this with La Nieta.
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.