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  • Country ranking ?

    232
  • Producer ranking ?

    15
  • Decanting time

    2h
  • When to drink

    2020-2035

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The Story

The Millenium red wine is made only with excellent vintages and it comes from Viña Alta, the oldest estate planted by Alejandro Fernández in Pesquera de Duero in the late 1960s. This wine is the only wine that Familia Fernández Rivera ages in French oak barrels.

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Wine Information

Bodegas Alejandro Fernández has 200 hectares of top quality vineyards, where the grapes are grown to make its Tinto Pesquera red wine. These vineyards soak up the heat of the sun in a site surrounded by pebbles and poor soil.
In 1972, Alejandro Fernández decided to take advantage of the land and create a wine that would surely do it proud – and this was how Tinto Pesquera came into being.
The 1982 vintage was one of the best in living memory. This lead Alejandro Fernández to carrying out a unique wxperience: making two different wines from the same grapes. Firstly, he took half the bunches and placed then whole onto the old dtone wine press to make wine in the traditional way. Then he de-stemmed the remaining grapes and fermented them in the winery's stainless steel tanks.
Both wines satisfied their maker. The first wine, which was made in the traditional way, was only sold in Spain. The second, however, was the first Pesquera wine to be exported and opened up the way to the winery's worldwide renown in the wine world.
But Alejandro wanted to go just a little bit further. He mixed the last 2000 litres of each kind of wine in equal measures and placed the resulting wine to "rest" for three years in old American oak barrels. The end result was a totally unique, extraordinarily comölex and balanced wine bottled in 1986 that was different from the rest.
The wine was named "Janus" after the Roman god of doors, thresholds, communication routes and anything that has a beginning.


It is impossible to speak of modern Spanish wine without mentioning the key role that Alejandro Fernández played in shaping it. The wines that people drank in Spain at the time he created Tinto Pesquera were nothing like the wines we enjoy today. They were classic reds, rather colourless, with little body and a distinctly woody flavour. The wine that Alejandro produced was of another class altogether. It was of a darker, deep red colour rather than the usual brick-red shade and it was an intense wine, more fruity than woody in nature. It was heavy in tannin and designed to keep for many years in the bottle. It was an original wine that at first seemed too much of a risk with features that came as a surprise to everyone. But just over 20 years later, it is the basis for many of the great Spanish wines.

Alejandro Fernández provides a simple explanation for why he produced such a distinctive wine. "Wines like this with greater body and colour had always been produced in Pesquera and I wanted to continue the tradition while improving on it: harvesting the grapes on time, selecting the right grapes, making the wine well and ensuring that the woodiness does not outstrip the fruitiness."

During the earliest years, Fernández made wine with a small press, which he has kept to this day. It was only in 1982 that that he started using stainless steel vats, which Alejandro and his family set up in the old workshop, a custom that has lasted to the present day.

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Information

Origin

Valladolid, Ribera de Duero
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