Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2013 El Puntido Gran Reserva started very shy and closed; it took time to open up to slowly unfurl the more tertiary notes, despite its youth. It reveals great complexity and nuance. It's a triumph over the adverse conditions of a challenging year like 2013, a year with a lot of rain and a cold summer with lots of cloudy days when people thought the grapes were not going to ripen. It has a classical nose with notes of cherries in liqueur, cigar ash, decayed leaves and truffles with the spiciness from the 28 months in new French oak barrels and a lactic touch. The palate is polished, sleek and elegant.
-
Wine Spectator
There's an elegance to this richly detailed red, with its fine-grained tannins and creamy texture well-meshed with a mix of baked blackberry, plum sauce, ground coffee and graphite notes. Firms up a bit on the fresh finish but shows fine length and expression, with lingering, fragrant hints of sassafras root, white pepper and sweet tobacco. Drink now through 2038.
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.