La Rioja, Spain

750ml

Tempranillo | Graciano

98 JS | 95 RP | 95 JG | 95 V | 93 WS

“The 2015 Rioja “Selección Especial 904” Gran Reserva from La Rioja Alta is crafted from a blend of eighty-nine percent tempranillo and eleven percent graciano in this vintage, with all of these vines at least sixty years of age. The wine was raised in four and a half year-old American oak barrels for thirty-three months prior to assemblage and bottling. The wine offers up a stunningly beautiful bouquet of red and black raspberries, cigar wrapper, a lovely array of Rioja spice tones, salty soil tones, woodsmoke and a lovely framing of coconutty American oak. On the palate the wine is deep, ripe and full-bodied, with a sappy core of fruit, superb soil inflection and grip, suave, seamless tannins, beautiful focus and balance and a very, very long, complex and utterly refined finish. This wine comes in at 14.5 percent in the ripe vintage of 2015, but there is absolutely no hint of heat on the backend, which is just utterly classical and stunning. At eight years of age, this wine is certainly approachable already, but in reality it is still a young wine and it will not to show all of its layers of complexity without another decade’s worth of bottle age. It is a brilliant wine.”