Lopez de Heredia Vina Tondonia Gran Reserva 2001

This is truly rare wine produced only in exceptional vintages. Amongst the greatest fine wines of Spain, this bottle - whose fruit is sourced exclusively from the acclaimed Vina Tondonia Vineyard - is a truly alluring example of what Rioja can be at its greatest. Having spent ten years in barrel and a further twelve years in bottle before release, this is a wine with prodigious ability to age. 

98/100 - The 2001 Viña Tondonia Gran Reserva is the follow-up of the 1995. There is a sense of harmony and elegance, of nuance and subtleness that wasn't quite the same in the Bosconia, as comparing both wines is inevitable. They started picking the red grapes the 15th of October, and the last grapes were picked the 29th of October with good weather. The grapes ripened properly and thoroughly, and the wine has great balance for a long aging in bottle. This is 70% Tempranillo, 20% Garnacho and 5% each Graciano and Mazuelo that fermented in their 153-year-old oak vats with indigenous yeasts and matured in used barrels for 10 years. It has 13% alcohol, a pH of 3.4 and 6.4 grams of acidity (tartaric). The nose shows young (tasting it blind, you'd guess a 10-year old wine, not a 20-year-old wine!). It has a nose of sweet spices, underbrush and cigar ash, somewhat balsamic, bramble fruit with perfect ripeness, integrated and young but starting to show some tertiary complexity. The palate is velvety and medium-bodied, with fine-grained, chalky tannins denoting a limestone soil that brings finesse and texture and a sapid, tasty, almost salty finish. This is going to make a beautiful bottle of old Rioja in 30 years' time! 25,000 bottles produced. It was bottled after being fined with egg whites in July 2012. - Luis Gutiérrez, Wine Advocate

97/100 - López de Heredia provides the best justification for Rioja's classification on ageing. The Gran Reserva tends to be much more dense and complex than the Reservas. It is made only in exceptional vintages, in principle upon the same recipe as the old 6° Año wines: 10 years in oak vats, regular racking, no filtration, with the added value of extra care in the vineyard. The wine appears developed on the nose, spicy and balsamic, in surprising contrast to its lively and well-rounded expression in the mouth. It is definitely a pleasure now, but it would be a pity not to wait for the increase in refinement and complexity that long bottle ageing will confer to it. Indeed, I do not know how, this wine is likely to develop as its 1995 sibling - the last vintage before this one - becoming less developed with age, as if it were a vinous Benjamin Button. - Pedro Ballesteros Torres MW, Decanter

97/100 - Wow. This is really something on the nose, offering ripe plums that are highlighted with old and used leather, walnut and cedar, reminiscent of the interior of a fine vintage sports car. Full-bodied with very fine tannins and delicious, ripe fruit that continues on for minutes. Tile and dark berry at the end. Still tight and fresh for the vintage. A great wine. Drink or hold. - James Suckling