The otherworldly 2001 Bodega Matador Parreno is a very special wine from López de Heredia in Rioja. There are just ten barrels of this wine from the outstanding 2001 vintage in the region, mostly Tempranillo from their Viña Tondonia, but like all their reds, it also has small percentages of other red grapes and perhaps a touch of white too. Their Gran Reserva reds spend ten years in oak and a further ten years in bottle before they are released. For some reason, some ten barrels were left behind, and the wine aged in used oak barrels for much longer, which means the wine spent some five years in large oak vats and almost 11 more years in well-seasoned American oak barriques. By the time it was bottled, the power of the vintage had been tamed, and the wine had acquired incredible nuance and finesse as well as great complexity, while it still feels young and with potential to improve for a long time in bottle. It would be impossible to guess the age if tasted blind, as the wine feels much younger than what it is. The texture is velvety, with resolved tannins, great concentration, finesse and elegance, with incredible balance and an aftertaste full of exotic spices, orange peel, tobacco and ripe berry fruit. The flavors linger in your mouth forever after you swallow. 3,000 bottles were filled on December 14th, 2017 (I know the exact date because I happened to be in the winery on precisely that day!). Take this as a unique, one-off, super Gran Reserva from Viña Tondonia. While this is very drinkable now (I have consumed a good dozen bottles already), it has all that it takes for a long life in bottle: this should outlive most of us. Furthermore, this is considerably cheaper than the Gran Reserva, which will not be released until 2021 (and let’s see what the price is then). It will make for a great comparison to have the two wines together in about three years from now. In the meantime, if I were you, I’d run to get as many bottles of it as you possibly can. To be fair, in fact, I already did!

“Matador” is the name of a very special art magazine published in Spain. They only publish one issue per year, and it’s sold by subscription only. Each year they release an issue that carries a letter of the alphabet. Once the alphabet is over, the magazine will cease to exist. This year they release their T issue. The same team opened a private club in Madrid, where the members can meet, eat and drink with their guests, and there have been some extraordinary meetings in which the future of Spanish wine and vineyards were discussed. These extraordinary meetings led to the creation of the so-called Manifiesto Matador, which you can read in full in one of my previous Rioja articles. The magazine’s director, Alberto Anaut, is a well-known journalist and a long-time friend of Telmo Rodríguez; and Rodríguez convinced Anaut to source and bottle special, one-off wines, dress them with a label created by an artist and offer these wines on a yearly basis to the magazine subscribers.

The collection has seen wines from prominent names like Peter Sisseck and Álvaro Palacios. Their private bottlings can also be found in some wine shops from Spain and on restaurant lists but are not sold through the wineries’ importers. For the T issue, Rodríguez found a special cuvée from what should have been part of the Gran Reserva from Viña Tondonia but for some reason had not been bottled with the rest of the wine. These ten barrels were bottled at the end of 2017 after some 16 years of élevage and were assigned a photograph of a fish for the label, which looks nothing like the wines from López de Heredia. In fact, when I discussed the label with María José López de Heredia, a recalcitrant traditionalist, she simply told me, “if my dad saw that label, he’d die again!” So, here we have a unique wine that might be difficult to find outside Spain, but it’s a wine that is well worth seeking out—and one that made my heart beat faster. I have already recommended it to a lot of friends, so I finally thought our readers should also get the chance to know about it.

by Luis Gutiérrez for WA, June 2018