Built from 100 percent Tinto de Toro grown on 60- to 90-year-old vines in soils of stony, sandy clay. The wine aged for two years in French and American oak barrels, half new.
It offers a heady perfume of potpourri, dried herbs, black plum skin, dried cherries, and wood. Its red-fleshed body has a blackberry bitterness and an assertive, muscular armature of oaky tannins, but lingering cherry fruit mingles in the mid-palate to make the mouth water and wash through this chewy, drying effect. A sense of cedar, old wood, and tobacco lingers afterward.
Youthful but promising, so give it a few years in bottle to allow these elements to soften and integrate. If you must open it now, serve it with very rich, savory, and proteinaceous cuisine: beef, mushrooms, rich cheese, or all three.
14.5% abv | $65 (sample) Imported by Grapes of Spain, Inc.
