Winemaker Notes
Vinedos de Paganos La Nieta is a purple black color. Fine on the nose, it displays aromas of ripe red fruit, flowers, noble woods and spices. On the palate it is voluminous, intense, broad, with structure and outstanding balance.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A naturally concentrated red with a lifted chalky touch to its extremely healthy fruit. Blackberries, blueberries, fine spices, blue flowers, violets, dark olives and minerals. So fresh, juicy and sophisticated, with filigreed tannins that support and melt. Long, subtle and bright. Very linear and elegant in quality.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 La Nieta is among the finest wines in its powerful, ripe and generously oaked, modern style of red Rioja. It's a single-vineyard Tempranillo with 14.05% alcohol, a pH of 3.63 and 5.8 grams of acidity. It comes from the 1.75-hectare vineyard that named the wine. It was planted in 1975 on silt, clay and sandstone soils in Páganos (Laguardia) at 525 meters above sea level and worked biodynamically (but not certified). The hand-destemmed grapes fermented in small 2,000-liter oak vats with yeasts selected from their vineyards and matured in new French oak barrels for 15 months. It felt very balanced, a little shy and undeveloped, elegant and fresh in this slightly cooler year. The grapes ripened slowly and had a full development of aromas and flavors, making the wine more nuanced and complex, while the palate kept very good balance with its freshness. The tannins are very complete and elegant. It opened up with time in the glass to more floral aromas, making it the most perfumed of the wines from the Eguren family that I tasted this time.
Rating: 97+ -
Jeb Dunnuck
Coming from a tiny single vineyard of clay and sandstone soils and aged 16 months in new French oak, the 2021 La Nieta is deep purple-hued, with a tight, reserved nose of pure darker fruits (cassis, blackberries) as well as spicy herbs, white pepper, leather, and hints of tobacco. It's concentrated, medium to full-bodied, has a pure, elegant mouthfeel, and ample tannins. It's a gorgeous wine, but the cellar will be your friend. Rating: 96+
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine has a nose of black currant, coffee bean and butterscotch. It is smooth in the mouth, with satiny tannins and flavors of black cherry, raspberry, milk chocolate, anisette and lavender that evaporate into a floral-strewn finish.
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Wine Spectator
This gorgeous red glides across the palate, delivering a tapestry of flavors including cherry preserves, blackberry paste, tangerine peel, tar, black licorice, tobacco and chai spices, with jasmine accents. Though rich and expansive, this offers a weightless, fine, silky feel, deftly knitting fresh acidity and supple, chalky tannins. Revealing more as it opens in the glass, this is long and focused on the finish.
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.