a fine wine tasting archive
3 notes
Harvested in 1970, bottled only in July 1982 — Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva Especial is declared only in exceptional years. Fifty-four years on, the colour had long since faded to brick, but the acidity was still razor-sharp.
Beronia began in 1973 as a project among friends from a Basque gastronomic society, named for the Iron Age people who lived along the Ebro before the Romans. Its Reserva from 2015 — a warm, generous Rioja year — opened at home on a summer night, six years on.
A two-hectare plot in Labastida, forty-year-old Tempranillo, twelve months in oak, and one of the great modern Rioja vintages. Sixteen years on it had shed the label 'modern' altogether.