The Soul of Rioja and Etna's Explosion of Quality: Weekly Tasting Report (July 27-Aug 2)
Spain rose to the top of our weekly tasting report of 613 wines, thanks to the iconic winemaker Telmo Rodriguez, who made two idiosyncratic and breathtaking 100-pointers from Rioja and a bunch of other atypical, terroir-transparent wines that came close to matching the quality of the former.
For one of our perfect wines, the Compañia de Vinos Telmo Rodriguez Rioja Las Beatas 2019, the quest for perfection came effortlessly, with a natural flair and intuition. This linear field blend of nine varieties, based on tempranillo, comes from the 1.9-hectare Las Beatas vineyard – a Grand Cru in the village of Labastida that Rodriguez considers to be Rioja’s version of Vosne-Romanee.
The wine’s weightless and soulful sensibility had Senior Editor Zekun Shuai feeling its magic, with nothing deliberate on the palate except immaculate purity. A scented, floral perfume flows gently through this wine, with nimble berries and sea urchin adding to the incredibly silky, ethereal and mineral palate.
Another single-vineyard offering from Labastida, the Compañia de Vinos Telmo Rodriguez Rioja Tabuerniga 2019, is as pure and soft-spoken as Las Beatas but accentuated by more verticality from the tannins, and comes with a tad more graciano. Rodriguez also delivered two wines from vineyards in Lanciego, which are on par with the Labastida vineyards. His Bodega Lanzaga La Estrada 2019 is a tangy, peppery offering of mainly tempranillo with some graciano – an atypical blend for a Rioja traditionalist – while the Bodega Lanzaga Rioja El Velado 2019 shows great depth and implicit minerality from a 0.93-hectare vineyard with a significant portion of garnacha.
The other Rodriguez wine we rated 100 points, the Yjar Rioja 2018, is a new project from a massal selection of a 3.8-hectare vineyard in Remelluri based on tempranillo and garnacha and a few other grapes. It’s a very distinctive expression if you compare it with Las Beatas, exuding a little more plushness and sophistication but remaining restrained, deep and highly complex.
In a Zoom call, Rodriguez said 2018 was an amazing vintage for Remelluri, with a bumper crop full of great freshness and delicate tannins. Last year, he told us that Maria Jose Lopez de Heredia, the fourth-generation owner of Lopez de Heredia, who keeps a thick book of vintage records dating back decades, believed the conditions in 2018 were exactly the same as those that produced the great 1964.
If so, Yjar Rioja 2018 is the best example of the unfathomable potential of this vintage. Like all of Rodriguez’s Remelluri and Lanciego offerings, we love this wine’s precision and intellectual aspect. Even though it might not be as unique, ethereal and cerebral as Las Beatas, it shows high-pitched balance, elegance and completeness. Any more of these qualities would be redundant; any less, reductive.
READ MORE: TOP 100 WINES OF SPAIN 2021
ETNA COMES ALIVE
Meanwhile, James and his two associate editors, Claire Nesbitt and Nathan Slone, have been tasting hundreds of wines and visiting various cellars in Sicily during the week. Most of the trip has been focused on the areas of Etna and Noto. The latter is the best region for nero d’avola and grillo while Etna is the famous volcanic area known for its unique reds and whites, which are mostly made from local varietals such as nerello mascalese and carricante. The tasting notes for Etna will be posted in next week’s report.
What is interesting is that James sees a real improvement in winemaking in Sicily, with more wines of quality coming from the island. He has been visiting Sicily as a wine critic and journalist since 1983 and has always had high hopes for the area’s fine wines. For a number of years, mostly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he noted how the wines were made in an overdone, international style, with so many producers only price-driven in their winemaking. The result was wines of little interest, although they were relatively clean.
Perhaps it was the emergence of Etna wines in the mid-2000s that served as a stimulus for an improvement in wine quality with indigenous grape types, James said during the trip, and many of the two dozen or so winemakers James and the team spoke to agreed.
“Now you see finer and more sophisticated wines being produced all over the island,” James said at separate dinners for a handful of wine producers from Etna and Noto in Feudo Maccari. “Sicily seems to finally be at a point of departure for great winemaking and we look forward to covering the island in a more in-depth way in the future.”
READ MORE: ETNA ERUPTS IN THE GLASS AS ITALY’S COLORFUL WINE PLUME SPREADS
RIESLING SURPRISE
After many weeks of tasting the wines of Alsace and Burgundy in France, plus Alto Adige and Trentino in Italy, Senior Editor Stuart Pigott finally started intensively tasting the 2021 vintage white wines of Germany. Right away came a great surprise.
“Logically, the 2021 rieslings from the Nahe ought to be very high in acidity, because that’s the naturally tendency of this region and 2021 is a high-acidity vintage, but that’s not the case here,” Stuart said.
Why the 2021 Nahe rieslings are more harmonious than comparable wines from other regions is a mystery he hopes to solve before writing the full 2022 Germany report, but, he added, “This is good news for wine drinkers!”
“The Schäfer Fröhlich Riesling Nahe Felseneck GG 2021 is the strongest of many remarkable 2021 dry rieslings I tasted during my days in the Nahe region,” he said. “Winemaker Tim Frohlich has also made a truly astonishing spatlese from the same vineyard site, the Schäfer Fröhlich Riesling Nahe Felseneck Spätlese Gold Cap 2021.”
Stuart’s ratings suggest that the Dr. Crusius and Gut Hermannsberg wineries have probably made their best dry and sweet rieslings of recent times.
Stuart also tasted the 2020 wines from Katharina Prum of Joh. Jos. Prüm in the Mosel. “This is a remarkable range of Mosel wines that share a wonderful vitality and filigree for such a warm vintage,” he said. “Most of them are delicious now, but have decades of life ahead of them.”
– Zekun Shuai, Senior Editor; James Suckling, Editor/Chairman; Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor
The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the past week by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.
Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.