Artadi El Carretil 2013
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Robert
Parker
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
A wine that always feels more marked by the oak, the 2013 El Carretil showed abundant roasted notes, hints of coffee and dark chocolate, with empyreumatic sensations. This wine always had a lower pH and higher acidity, which according to López de Lacalle might be the reason why the wine is consistently more marked by the oak; I don't quite understand this, because my experience is that usually wines with higher pH and lower acidity tend to show more the effect of the oak. This will certainly require some more time in bottle, especially for the toasty notes to get integrated, because the palate does not show oak tannins, but rather the chalky austere tannins from the rather austere soils (with some 17% active limestone when the average is about 12-13%), which are whiter and quite shallow. It's also true that the wine matured in new barriques. ("I hate used barrels," Juan Carlos López de Lacalle told me. "And the problem is that we still don't get the quality of oak we want in larger barrels...") This is the oakier of all ten wines I tasted from Artadi. Will it integrate with time? I hope so, because the quality of the wine is super. There are some 4,000 bottles in 2013.
Rating: 94?
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Artadi is about purity of extracted fruit with almost Burgundian textures. In fact, critics have often compared these wines to the top wines of Chambolle-Musigny and other top appellations of Burgundy. The key to this level of elegance comes from the cold wines of the Pyrenees which blow from the north. This coupled with moderate temperatures tend to make these wines a study in elegance and power, the iron fist in a velvet glove if you will. They are some of the most extraordinary examples of Tempranillo in the world.
Hailed as the star red variety in Spain’s most celebrated wine region, Tempranillo from Rioja, or simply labeled, “Rioja,” produces elegant wines with complex notes of red and black fruit, crushed rock, leather, toast and tobacco, whose best examples are fully capable of decades of improvement in the cellar.
Rioja wines are typically a blend of fruit from its three sub-regions: Rioja Alta, Rioja Alavesa and Rioja Oriental, although specific sub-region (zonas), village (municipios) and vineyard (viñedo singular) wines can now be labeled. Rioja Alta and Alavesa, at the highest elevations, are considered to be the source of the brightest, most elegant fruit, while grapes from the warmer and drier, Rioja Oriental, produce wines with deep color, great body and richness.