RP 97/100 | Drink: 2025 - 2038 | The 2019 Yjar is the third vintage of this top-of-the-range wine, which is designed for the international market and sold through the négociant system of Place de Bordeaux. It's a blend of Tempranillo, Garnacha, Graciano and other grapes from 3.8 hectares of selected plots from the Remelluri vineyards, which were cropped from a challenging year with frost. This feels young but already very Rioja, marked by the Garnacha, which represented around 30% of the bottled blend. It's tense and has abundant but fine-grained tannins, a little Italian in style. They kept a lower alcoholic degree in 2019, a moderate 14%, and the wine comes through as very elegant. This has to be my favorite vintage of Yjar. It spent 30 months in barrels of different sizes and foudres. 9,049 bottles were filled in June 2022. There is a big change in the range of Lindes, the wines produced with grapes from external local grape growers from the neighboring villages. They have bottled six different wines from 2020, selecting grapes from six different villages. In 2020, they had two episodes of hail and they had to sort, select and discard, and they also bought grapes from different growers, including Marqués de Legarda from Ábalos. It was a learning exercise to understand the character of each of the villages in a journey that continues in 2021 and 2022, trying to enhance the differences between the villages with a simpler enology. There's also a Grandes Lindes, a very special bottling from a truly exceptional vineyard. It might be a collection that grows in the future if they find more exceptional vineyards. This project has been ongoing since 2011, but they never released any of the wines until today with a wine from San Vicente de la Sonsierra from 2019, but they still have all previous vintages, around 2,000 bottles each year, in their cellar. As for the classical Remelluri wines, they are changing the concept; the new wines will come from the 2020 harvest, and they have reduced quantities tremendously. They probably did less than 200,000 kilos of grapes in 2020, when they had done 400,000 kilos in the past... So, I only tasted the white from 2020; the Yjar sold at La Place de Bordeaux in September 2023 and the classical reds will come in the future.
Land: Spanje
Jaartal: 2019
Regio: La Rioja
Appelatie / Herkomst: Rioja DOCa
Druivenras: Tempranillo, Graciano, Grenache
Serveertemperatuur: 16-18°C
