2017 Rioja Reserva
Estimated value
Buying options
Tasting notes
Full bottle 1,198 g. Sustainably produced (winery and vineyards). Three years' ageing in mixed oak barrels. There is a smell that takes me straight back to my childhood, walking into the incredibly tall tobacco curing barns on a Zimbabwean farm I loved very much – the graded scent from the herbaceous catch of stiff green leaves to, at the very back of the barn, the rich baritone spices of crackling dry, deep copper-brown leaves. This wine smells like that walk. Brushing past the vast hanging pulley systems, tied bunches of leaves disappearing into the darkness high, high up above, steam filling the air, top lip beading with sweat. And then it tastes like that steam and it tastes like wild bramble berries picked on a late, hot summer afternoon, thorns catching on forearms and nettles stinging bare calves. It tastes like the berry that you dropped and scooped up anyway, popped in your mouth, tasting purple sweet under just-cut hay and purslane and summer dust. For a wine that is produced in vast quantities and sold in supermarkets at under £15, this is astoundingly good. If you're getting married or having a big party and looking for a red wine that is genuinely good, will make everyone happy, and won't cost the earth, this would be my first recommendation. (TC)
Critic scores
Average Score
Tamlyn Currin, jancisrobinson.com
Tamlyn Currin, jancisrobinson.com
More reviews and scores
Tasted from a 10-cl mini sample tube. 93% Tempranillo, 6% Graciano, 1% Mazuelo from 40- to 60-year-old vines on chalky clay soils, a sloped vineyard north-east of the winery at 500–600 m. Picked beginning of October. 18 months in unusual barrels – the heads are French oak, and the staves are American – and a mix of new and one-wine. Wine director Matías Calleja says that this very particular combination of French and American oak allows the wine ‘to relax naturally’, and the integration of two different oaks begins from the outset so that they don’t have to blend and marry two wines that have matured in two totally different types of oak. 18 months in bottle before release. Bottled October 2020. RS 1.9 g/l, TA 5.7 g/l, VA 0.69 g/l, pH 3.6. From the very start, the fruit aromatics on this wine are almost outrageously expressive, so intense yet so spunky that I wanted to laugh out loud on just one breathing-in of them! Ridiculously, deliciously jam-packed with this firework-flung handful of coruscatingly bright fruit that is simply irresistible. A Catherine-wheel of plums and damsons. Delicious peppery and fine-ground cumin spice. Blood orange and exploding with white pepper. For some crazy reason, I taste this wine and all I can think of is Sara Bareilles and her Brave . Maybe because I sip this and want to go silly dance. Tight, tight tannins but absolutely delicious. It would be incredibly difficult, having tasted this, to leave it in the rack long enough to age. Although Calleja assures us it will. VGV (TC)
A soft, fruity red with berry, chocolate and walnut character. Medium body, creamy-textured tannins and plenty of flavor at the end. Drink or hold.