Uutiset
2013 – Imperial Gran Reserva number 1 Top 100 Wine Spectator!
Imperial Gran Reserva 2004 is named #1 Wine of the Year by the prestigious Wine Spectator Magazine in its list of top 100 Wines in 2013. This is the first time in history that a Spanish wine is recognized as the number 1 worldwide.
CVNE buys historic Cava producer
Compañia Vinicola del Norte de España (CVNE), one of Rioja’s oldest family-controlled wineries, has announced that it has bought Cava DO producer Roger Goulart. Financial details were not disclosed.
‘We’ve been looking at wineries outside of Rioja for a while and are thrilled to announce that Roger Goulart will join our portfolio,’ said CVNE’s CEO, Victor Urrutia. ‘We plan to keep the historical and cultural legacy of the winery alive.’
Roger Goulart’s history stretches back as far as 1882, when its founders, the Canal family, formed part of a new wave of Penedès winemakers producing traditional method sparkling wines, which became the signature style of Cava.
The Cava bodega will now join four Rioja producers — Cune, Imperial, Viña Real and Continuo — within CVNE’s collection of wineries.
Although it’s now a public company, CVNE is still run by descendants of its original founders, brothers Eusebio and Raimundo Real de Asúa, who established it in 1879.
“CARO at CVNE” Anthony Caro (1924 -2013) is one of the most important British sculptors of the 20th Century.
The selection comprises a total of 23 sculptures by Caro, twelve of which are on display indoors, with the remainder at various locations around the buildings and gardens of the winery.
In the music of his sculpture Caro convokes and evokes. Concepts and images converge and intertwine in their own identity. Caro’s visual experience is always accumulative, capable of fermenting like good wine and emerging when its presence is required.
Lauded as the greatest British sculptor of his generation, Anthony Caro is one of the most important British sculptors of the 20th Century. His work, characterised by assemblages of metal using ‘found’ industrial objects has been presented and collected at major museums worldwide, including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Bilbao, Spain: the Institute of Modern Art, Valencia, Spain; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Tate Gallery Museum, London, the National Portrait Gallery, London; three museums in Pas-de-Calais; France to accompany the 2008 inauguration of Caro’s ‘Chapel of Light’ situated in the Church of St Jean Baptiste in Bourbourg, Northern France; and the Museo Correr, Venice, Italy.
Cune Rioja Imperial Gran Reserva 2004 garners No. 1 spot on Wine Spectator’s 2013 Top 100 List, a first for Spain
The number one wine on the Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2013 is a red Spanish wine from Rioja: CVNE / Cune Rioja Imperial Gran Reserva 2004 – 95 points. This is the first time in the history of the Top 100 that a wine from Spain has been the top wine of the year.
We noted in our previous article that Rioja as a wine producing region did remarkably well on the Top 100 list for 2013. Five of the nine Spanish wines on the list were from Rioja.
Vina Real Gran Reserva 1959 Parker 100 points
1959 was one of the best vintages in the history of Rioja, even though 1958 was classified as excellent and 1959 "only" received a very good score. Nowadays most of the wines from 1959 are still in very good shape. I have been lucky enough to drink the 1959 Viña Real Gran Reserva before and some bottles had been flirting with perfection. The one that sparkled this tasting note clearly was. The wine was not bottled until June 1968, nearly nine years after the harvest. Motown Records was founded in 1959, the year when a chartered plane transporting musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper piloted by Roger Peterson went down in foggy conditions near Clear Lake, Iowa, killing all four on board. The tragedy was later termed "The Day the Music Died," popularized in Don McLean's 1972 song "American Pie." Fidel Castro became Premier of Cuba, the Barbie doll made its debut and the original Mini Cooper car was launched. The film "Ben-Hur," starring Charlton Heston, was released and became a great hit, eventually winning 11 Academy Awards. The American President was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Imagine how they harvested those grapes in Rioja. This was an amazing vintage and this was a superb bottle, all complexity and elegance, really developed, with great acidity. It is really long and balanced, with surprising balsamic, youthful aromas. Harmonic, young but developed, intense but light, somehow contradictory, but everyone was in agreement: glasses were soon empty, the best sign for a favorite wine. Judging by this bottle, this wine could go on, and on, and on and on...Anticipated maturity: 2015-2035.
I think context is very important in wine, and when I drink old bottles I always think how the world was when they harvested the grapes: what happened that year, how people lived and how they made the wine. It's sometimes mind boggling to drink some very old wines, a real privilege which, I often say, is as close as you can get to time travel. So I've given some context to all these wines. I'm told nobody reads the tasting notes and people only look at the scores, let's see if we get some reaction on these. Even though the tasting was excellent, I expected even more; we had too many corked wines and some vintages had shown better on other occasions. But such is the case with old wines, there are no great vintages anymore, only great bottles. Highlights of the tasting were 1959, 1947 and 1938. On top of those, there was one outstanding and perfect wine that day, and, as I might not find better excuse to publish a note on it than now, I've included it here. It's an historical wine, a one-off, semi-sweet white produced at the end of the Spanish Civil War, a wine impossible to replicate, fruit of impossible circumstances, a wine I've had the luck to drink and share with many people on a number of occasions and which never fails to impress everyone. The perfect 1939 CVNE Rioja Blanco Semi Dulce Corona is a mythical wine!