Marqués de Riscal Gran Reserva 2012, Rioja, Spain 🇪🇸

🍇 Tempranillo 78%
🍇 Graciano & Mazuelo  22%

🧐 Alcohol 14.5%

🍁 My Score 91 Points

🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔸🔸🔸🔸🔸

Sensuous bouquet with aromas of cherries, plums, dried figs, Asian spices, leather, vanilla and toasty notes. On the mouthfeel medium-full bodied, beautiful texture, flavourful with fine grainy tannins and refreshing acidity. The finish is long, smooth with plenty of exotic flavours.

🔸🔸🔸🔸🔸🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹

Another Spanish beauty! What I truly appreciate, is how well integrated the oak is at this stage and how delicious and elegant the mouthfeel is. I have enjoyed a few Gran Reserva lately and this is definitely the smoothest and most exotic. Strongly recommended my wine friends. Cheers 🍷

Herederos del Marqués de Riscal Rioja Reserva 2014, Rioja, Spain 🇪🇸

🍇 Tempranillo 90%
🍇 Graciano 7%
🍇 Mazuelo 3%

🧐 Alcohol 14%

🍁 My Score 90 Points

🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔸🔸🔸🔸🔸

Sensuous nose with aromas of blackberries, dark plums, dried figs, spicy, oak and vanilla notes. On the mouthfeel, medium-full bodied, smooth and elegant texture, grainy tannins and fresh acidity.The finish is medium-long, smooth with flavourful toasty oak and earthy flavours.

🔸🔸🔸🔸🔸🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹

Few meals makes me more happy than a charcuterie and cheese platter paired with a classic Spanish Rioja. With an strong umami flavoured meal like this platter it’s hard for me to think of any other wine that would work this well. As for this Rioja Reserva from Marqués de Riscal, a Classic Rioja with plenty of well integrated oak at this stage, beautiful texture, seductive mouthfeel and very flavourful. Definitely a great value.

I would especially like to mention my favourite butcher shop, here in Victoria @farmandfieldbutchers. It’s always a great shopping experience, beautiful layout, clean store, friendly and helpful staff and beautiful appetizing meat counter. Their selection of cured meat is top notch. For this platter;

-Bison and elk salami
-Duck noisette salami
-Triple fennel ale salami and
-Two rivers spicy Coppa

All of them very delicious. Cheers my wine friends 🍷🙂