Senorio de San Vicente Tempranillo, Rioja DOCa, Spain 2019

San Vicente is perhaps the Eguren family’s most well known wine, as it was the wine that first put them on the map. At a time when people were obsessed with producing classic style Rioja wines, Marcos and Miguel Angel Eguren strove to produce a Bordeaux styled single vineyard wine. They selected one of their magic vineyards, Finca La Canoca, to produce San Vicente. Located in a tiny valley at the foothills of the Sierra Cantabria, Finca La Canoca is a vineyard of the unique Tempranillo Peludo variety. They built the wine from the vineyard. In 1991, when they began working on the project, there were no single vineyard Rioja wines. After the success of San Vicente, all of the great Rioja wineries followed suit, declassifying their top, flagship wines from the typical Rioja ageing system, and focusing on specific vineyards. San Vicente is a unique wine which marries the modern intensity of fruit and concentration with classic Old-World style Rioja aromatics of mountain herbs and licorice.

"The 2019 San Vicente was produced with Tempranillo Peludo, a special strain of Tempranillo planted from a massale selection in 1985 in the village of San Vicente de la Sonsierra. Like all their reds (except the carbonic maceration ones), the destemmed grapes fermented in French oak vats, and the wine matured in new oak barrels (90% French, 10% American) for 20 months. This wine is quite regular, and I found similar wines in 2019 and 2018, the two vintages that I tasted together, combining power and elegance and juicy fruit with good ripeness but without excess and good acidity and balance and fine-grained tannins." Wine Advocate 94