Gran Reserva Rioja

Try this wine before you die! Why?

The wines are already bottle aged to perfection on release. You get oodles of bottle age complexity without having to wait!

Grand Reserva Rioja are not only great value but also great wines. Typically spending several years aging in barrel and then several more in bottle before being released to the market. These wines have complexity in spade fulls and are immediately drinkable. Unlike a lot of high end New World reds, the bodegas have kindly done the bottle aging for you. And you don’t have to pay through the nose. Muchas Gracias.

Harvesting tempranillo at La Rioja Alta SA | © riojalta.com

Rioja came to prominence in the late 1800s when phylloxera (a destructive grapevine pest from America) devastated the vineyards of Bordeaux, and the rest of France. Wine merchants headed south of the Pyrenees to find a substitute for the dwindling stocks of Bordeaux wine. Rioja came to the rescue.

If you read writings of commentators of Bordeaux wines around the turn of the 20th Century, this is the style of wine they used to produced (albeit in French oak rather than American). And not surprisingly, towards the end of the 19th Century the bodegas in Rioja started using the same winemaking techniques as the counterparts over the Pyrenees in Bordeaux. 

This is a style of wine you don’t see being produced much these days and it’s delicious. Make sure you try a bottle before you die!  

Bottles of Gran Reserva Rioja patiently maturing in the 'bottle tunnel' at La Rioja Alta SA winery |
© riojalta.com