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Wine Description
The Story
Marqués de Riscal Reserva wines are basically made from grapes from tempranillo vines planted before de 70’s, grown in the best clay-limestone soils of the Rioja Alavesa. This variety withstands oak- and bottle ageing well thanks to its good balance of acidity and fine tannin. The Graciano and Mazuelo varieties, whose presence in the blend does not exceed 10%, provide crispness and a lively colour. Fermentation takes place at a controlled temperature of 26ºC and the maceration time is never more than 12 days.
Riscal reservas spend around two years in American Oak barrels, producing a wine which corresponds to the classic Rioja style: fresh, fine, elegant and very suitable for laying down for many years. Before release for sale it spends a minimum of one year rounding off in the bottle; time enough to show how much complexity tempranillo is able to achieve.
Wine Information
Spain by Riscal: Cold year. The silence of the archive says that the average of annual temperature was 12.7c and in 1960 was only 11.8c. However, the rain in quantity fitted to the standards of statistics and just exceeded 7%. Those same files, of incalculable wealth, take us to other shelves where experiences and wine experiences are registered. Today it can be appreciated as “black vineyard” a curiosity. Such denomination indicates a fruitless experience but curious derivative of wine-growing French bibliography that was inducing to apply cinder of train in the soil with the intention of fertilizing with ashes. They did not appreciate such marvels and until 1960 one withdrew this superficial cap, that plot was known inside the warehouse as “black vineyard “. There were three years without improvement for the grape but it has left a funny recollection for its aspect. This crop of grape of 1960 came to fulfill with loyalty the three wine-growing “sixties”. They passed sixty days from the blooming to the flowering. Other sixty from the flowering to the envero and sixty more from the envero of the grape to its vintage.
The harvest was not dense in color but it has supported splendidly the passage of time and the delicate sensations of fragrance have managed to extend. Nowadays, due to this, the balsamic fragrance of fresh tone strikes in the glass, whereas the color presents the typical red ruby bordered by a dense yellow.
The sensation in mouth is fresh with fixation in the top of the tongue, light palate and tannic moderated in the edges of the tongue, fundamentally in its lateral posterior zone. This wine came from the clay-calcareous soil low vineyards, from the level of 450m, since this year in the high zones, above 600m, the ripeness remained short. This vintage is the centenary recall for Riscal and for the whole Spanish wine-growing since it was in 1860 when it was signed the commercial agreement with France that pushed Spanish efforts for better wines.