Bodegas Muga Aro 2009
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2009 Aro is a blend of 30% Graciano and 70% Tempranillo. (The Muga family prefer blending to the pursuance of mono-varietals.) The Graciano is very expressive on the nose, lending it effervescence and animation, delivering scents of Indian ink, cassis and orange sorbet. The palate is very well-balanced with supple, saturated and grippy tannins. There is patently very well judged acidity and wonderful sense of symmetry and focus towards the finish. Intriguingly, it closes up in the glass, the tannins becoming more abrasive as if to say: "Don’t come back for several years, mate." Drink 2019-2035.
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James Suckling
So rich and decadent on the nose with dark berries, bark, tar and perfume, following through to a full body with rich, ripe flavors of licorice, aniseed, dark fruit and a hint of grilled meat. Goes on for minutes. Delicious now, but a long life ahead.
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Wine Spectator
This red delivers bold flavors of blackberry, pomegranate, licorice, tobacco and toast, structured by full, well-integrated tannins and lively acidity. The texture is lacy, but there's plenty of power in reserve.
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Wine & Spirits
A blend of tempranillo (70 percent) with graciano, this ages in large wooden vats for six months, then new French oak barrels for 18 months before bottling. It’s a tight 2009, showing some youthful reduction in cracked black pepper scents and the hard edges of its tannins. The fruit feels deeply umami, adding savor to the dark bitter chocolate richness. Destined for the cellar, this wine’s complexities will build out of its tannins as the fruit comes forward with age.
Other Vintages
2019-
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Bodegas Muga is a family firm founded in 1932 by Isaac Muga and Aurora Caño. The first wines were made in an underground cellar, until in 1968 they decided to set up their own winery in a beautiful old 19th-century town-house situated in the city of Haro. The Bodegas Muga outstanding feature is that it always uses the finest materials, combining tradition with the latest advances in winemaking so as always to give its wines the very best quality without losing authenticity. Indeed, it is the only wine cellar in Spain which employs its own master cooper and coopers, who make all the vats for the cellar as well as the oak casks. The winery remains true to traditional winemaking methods such as racking the casks by gravity and fining the wine with fresh egg whites. Bodegas Muga has succeeded in combining the purest family tradition with an updated vision of the future which has allowed them to preserve their own personality and character.
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.