Benjamin De Rothschild & Vega Sicilia Rioja Macan 2018 750ml
Rated 97 by Wine Enthusiast
This dark-garnet-colored wine has a nose of black currant, raspberry and milk chocolate. Deep fruit flavors of cassis and dark plums fill the mouth, joined by notes of cocoa powder, tobacco leaf and espresso bean. Fleecy tannins dissipate into a lingering, fruit-filled finish. Drink now through 2037.
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Rated 95 by James Suckling
A beautiful, complex nose with creamy spices, cedar, fresh blackberries, red plums, truffles and hints of walnuts and mocha. Medium to full body with multidimensional tannins that are tight as a rock, coating the palate in a linear way, penetrating from the entry to the end with a final thud. Give it three or years to come around. Drink from 2025.
Rated 94 by Wine Advocate
The 2018 Macán has moderate alcohol (14%) and more freshness (pH 3.69), reflecting a cooler and rainier year that forced them to fine-tune the sorting and selection of the grapes, which fermented with selected yeasts. The élevage was in barrel (55%) and larger foudres for 16 months. 2018 was quite different from 2019, as it was cooler and rainier. The wine is serious and harmonious, which was a challenge, and winemaker Gonzalo Iturriaga told me that they had to be very careful and sort and select the grapes. It's textured and elegant, a style that follows the path of the 2016; it's elegant but with depth, managing the élevage in foudre better, which was a learning process they started in 2016. 74,570 bottles, 2557 magnums and some larger formats produced. It was bottled in September 2020.
Rated 92 by Wine Spectator
Minerally on the nose, with hints of iron and tarry smoke underscoring a lovely range of crushed black cherry and wild strawberry fruit, revealing accents of dried mint, espresso and bitter almond. Firm and fresh, this tightly meshed version evolves in the glass and lingers on the lightly spiced finish. Drink now through 2030. 6,214 cases made, 580 cases imported.
Macán is made only from grapes of the Tempranillo variety, from a meticulous selection of mature plots found on high terraces with poor gravelly soils of a loamy-calcareous nature. During fermentation, in the winery´s first year, the extraction was very precise and the evolution of the oak lead to a better blending in the ageing phase, which took place in barrels (50 % new) of French origin and a 4,000-litre Foudre for sixteen months.