It has been awhile since I drank a Rioja. This wine I was served blind and I did not guess that it was a Rioja (I will not humiliate myself by telling you my guesses). But I thought it was delicious. Elegant and smooth was the first words I used and I added lovely cherry fruit and other red berries. A well balanced wine.
The grape is tempranillo from four different vineyards around Haro in the Rioja Alta. The taste of the oak is discreet. The wine has spent 10 months in partly new American barrels and partly in new French barrels. Here we have a skilled winemaker who knows how to handle the oak. Which is probably a necessity when you are responsible for a large oak barrel cellar with a French, American and Russian oak barrels and even some mixed. Bodegas LAN is owned by Portugal’s largest wine company Sogrape since 2012.
