Rioja Gran Reserva, Bodegas Ondarre 2019
James Suckling 90; Decanter World Wine Awards 95 points
Mix any six bottles and you pay the Any 6+ price at checkout — no code needed.
£10 tracked UK delivery, however many bottles.
We pack and send twice a week, Wednesdays and Fridays, by Royal Mail Tracked 48.
Members pay £17.60 — £4.40 less on this bottle. Membership is £120 a year and carries the EDKA Promise. Membership terms
Why this wine
Gran Reserva is the longest apprenticeship in Spanish wine, and Ondarre give this one 28 months on the lees in new oak and another 32 months in bottle before it leaves the cellar. What arrives is already mature — leather, tobacco, raisined fruit — with none of the waiting left to do. Rioja's most traditional style from the village's only winery.
At a glance
- Grape
- Tempranillo 90%, Mazuelo 10%
- Region
- Rioja, Spain
- Alcohol
- 13.50%
- Body
- Medium
- Acidity
- Medium
- Tannins
- Medium
- Sweetness
- Dry
- Drink
- Long (10-20 yrs)
- Pairs with
- Red Meat, Poultry & Pork, Cheese
How it tastes
A mature, complex bouquet of rich fruit and spice, with raisined fruit, tobacco and leather coming through behind it. Medium-bodied, elegant and velvety, with settled acidity and soft, resolved tannins. Tempranillo 90%, Mazuelo 10%.
The producer
Bodegas Ondarre was founded in 1985 and is the only winery in Viana, the village overlooking the Rioja valley in what is now Rioja Oriental; its Reservas are its most decorated wines, and it credits them to vineyard work and steady reinvestment in the cellar and its French and American oak. The fruit here comes from old vineyards around the village, 40-year-old low-yielding gobelet-trained vines on slopes climbing towards the Sierra at 600 to 750 metres, where shallow soils roughly 40 centimetres deep — sand, clay and limestone over sedimentary bedrock — sit on uneven ground cut by mountain streams that drain it well and make their own microclimate, and the vines have to struggle. Fermentation ran at 25 to 28°C with daily pumping over and délestage to draw out colour, flavour and tannin; malolactic conversion took place in new Missouri and central French oak casks, and the wine then aged on the lees for 28 months with regular racking, was fined naturally through successive rackings to keep its concentration, and spent a further 32 months in bottle before release.
Food and drinking
Serve at 16 to 18°C. Good with roast lamb, suckling pig, jamón ibérico, mushroom rice and aged Manchego. Drinking beautifully now and good through to about 2035. It was bottled without tartaric stabilisation and can throw a deposit, so decant it off the sediment an hour before serving. Suitable for vegetarians and vegans.