Montebuena Rioja [Tempranillo]
One of the things I like about the Utah wine stores,
especially the one that’s my usual haunt, is that they are really passionate
about the product line. It’s not simply an afterthought, grudgingly built and
stocked, but rather conducting classes and doing a great job with product
placement to highlight some lesser known but high value wines, usually near the
checkout. That was where I discovered this one.
The HSC is built around value and finding something like
this for under $10 definitely had my attention, particularly since the first
quite a few bottles turned out so very good. What we had was a light and lively
gem, delivering up that lovely berry taste that Tempranillo is so very good at,
while having a nice edge to it, so as to keep the fruit from being too
overwhelming. It was right on the border of needing more maturation time, but
was eminently drinkable, for the most part.
However, when you’re playing in the under $10 area, you tend
to be gambling a bit more than some of the higher priced entries and along down the
line, some streakiness came in. It’s kind of like “when he was good, he was
very good”, but here, it’s more like “when he was bad, he was notably less
good, but not quite bad outright.” In a few of these, the borderline elements,
such as the astringency, become assertive enough to make me wonder if it needs
more maturation and doesn’t ever seem to quite smooth out all the way, even
after more than an hour of air time. Fortunately, those bottles are not
especially common, but it does bear noting.
For quite a while, this was a Standard, but for that
classification, the HSC demands that the wines be able to be counted on time
after time and bottle after bottle. When it becomes less of a sure thing and
more of a gamble, which is reasonable when it’s on SPA and under $10, then it
can only be a SPA-Only wine.
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