Bodegas Muga, 'Prado Enea' Gran Reserva, Rioja, Spain, 1970

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Overview of the Wine
Bodegas Muga is a family firm founded in 1932 by Isaac Muga and Aurora Caño. The first wines were made in an underground cellar, until in 1968 they decided to set up their own winery in a beautiful old 19th-century town-house situated in the city of Haro. The Bodegas Muga outstanding feature is that it always uses the finest materials, combining tradition with the latest advances in winemaking so as always to give its wines the very best quality without losing authenticity. Indeed, it is the only wine cellar in Spain which employs its own master cooper and coopers, who make all the vats for the cellar as well as the oak casks. The winery remains true to traditional winemaking methods such as racking the casks by gravity and fining the wine with fresh egg whites. Bodegas Muga has succeeded in combining the purest family tradition with an updated vision of the future which has allowed them to preserve their own personality and character.

Grape / Blend
90% Tempranillo, 10% Viura

Origin
Rioja, Spain

Winemaker's Tasting Notes
The vineyards for Prado Enea are always amongst the last to be harvested by Bodegas Muga. Hand-harvested and transported to the winery in crates to protect the grapes from bruising and crushing. The berries are destemmed and optically sorted, but not crushed. Fermentation is started by pied de cuve and carried out in 10,000L (without temperature control) oak vats of varying sizes that are produced on the premises at Bodegas Muga. Malolactic is delayed until late Spring by cooling the cellars with ambient air. Malolactic is spontaneous and takes place in the fermentation vessel.

Prado Enea Gran Reserva is one of Rioja's flagship Gran Reservas, a wine that exemplifies the savory, developed nuance this classification is known for combined with the structure, fruit, freshness, acidity, and ageability of Rioja's greatest Gran Reservas from yesteryear.

96 Points - Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 1970 Prado Enea Gran Reserva, which would have included around 10% Viura, has a superb, vibrant bouquet with scents of lavender, dark chocolate and sage and a curious tincture of fried onions. The palate is amazingly fresh and vital with supple, fine tannins and sorbet-fresh, dark berry fruit mixed with bay leaf and cold black tea. The finish retains fine, robust tannins and the length is mightily impressive. Superb.

95 Points - James Suckling
This takes your breath away. Stunning freshness for a wine of this age. It shows pure glazed cherries, rose petals, dried cranberries, incense, red licorice, tar, leather and only a hint of anything woody. Stunning dried-berry and sweet-tobacco character on the medium-bodied palate, where the tannins have totally dissipated to reveal a super velvety and pliable texture.

94 Points - Decanter
The sweet raspberry fruit is fading at this point, replaced by spice, dried earth and leather notes offset by gorgeous menthol freshness on the finish and smoked, grilled aromatics that give a peaty feel. Long and complex, slowly makes its way through the palate. A high-altitude vineyard up at around 550m make this an extremely late ripening site, often into November before the final grapes come in, but no doubt helps maintain those notes of freshness that have kept it so full of life.

Product size: 750ml