2013 Vega Sicilia Valbuena 5

Brilliant ruby-red. A complex and highly expressive nose evokes fresh cherry, cassis, pipe tobacco and pungent flowers, and subtle vanilla and smoky mineral flourishes build in the glass. Sweet, penetrating and energetic on the palate, offering incisive dark berry, floral pastille and spicecake flavors that take a turn to finer red fruits on the back half. In a lithe, graceful style, showing superb finishing delineation and an impressively long, sweet, floral- and spice-laced finish. Note that there will be no Unico bottled from the 2013 vintage.

It is a wine that has yet to show its potential aromatically. It is closed, intriguing. The oak is very well placed. It is a fine vintage, very deep. It was a delicate year and the wine is clearly ready to be drunk now. On the other hand, the texture is very fine, more ethereal. It soars fantastically. It has a point of freshness that sustains its structure. Graphite, truffle and minerality above the fruit. I love to see how in a complicated vintage they produce such a truly remarkable wine. (FC)

This wine was re-tasted prior to this report with similar descriptors to my previous tasting for a report I published earlier this year and the score was the same. Cropped from an unusually cold and rainy vintage in which they will not bottle Único, the 2013 Valbuena is always released in its fifth year. It's mostly Tempranillo with 5% Merlot that was put through a three- to four-day cold soak in the oak vats, where it fermented with indigenous yeasts and was pumped over. It matured in new and used 225-liter French and American oak barriques and also in 20,000-liter oak vats, where the larger vessels respect the fruit, especially in a more fragile vintage like 2013. It's a very elegant and fresh Valbuena with a developed nose, quite classical with a fine texture, elegant tannins and a supple, long finish where the oak is still quite obvious. I liked it very much and consider it a triumph over the challenges of the year. 150,650 bottles and some larger formats were produced. It was bottled in June 2015.