Bodegas Muga Aro 2019
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Blend: 70% Tempranillo, 30% Graciano
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Pure magic, the 2019 Aro is 70% Tempranillo and 30% Graciano from a plant by plant selection of the Muga family's oldest vines of Tempranillo, blended with a substantial portion of Graciano. This dense purple behemoth has a primordial bouquet of pure cassis, graphite, crushed stone, lead pencil, new leather, and hints of spring flowers. Building incrementally on the palate, with full-bodied richness, a huge mid-palate, and ripe, velvety tannins, this is one heavenly Rioja that deserves 7-8 years of bottle age and will age like a First Growth from Bordeaux. Hats off to the team at Muga for another incredible wine.
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James Suckling
Blueberries, cassis, black pepper, nutmeg and some mahogany here. Salted plums, slate, tobacco leaves and lead-pencil shavings, too. Wow. It’s full-bodied, intense and so well integrated and polished with seamless tannins. Powerful, yet elegant at the same time. 70% tempranillo and 30% graciano. Try this from 2027.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
No 2017 or 2018 were produced of this luxury cuvée made with up to 30% Graciano to complement the Tempranillo from the villages of Labastida, Briñas and Villalba, so from the impressive 2016 I tasted in June 2019, we jumped to the 2019 Aro. The destemmed grapes went through optical sorting and fermented in small oak vats with indigenous yeasts followed by malolactic in new barrels, where the wine matured for 16 months. It's not a shy wine at 14.6% alcohol, and the Graciano provides extra acidity and vibrancy. It has great balance and a spark of acidity and is a very complete wine, with great aromatics and integrated oak (all new barrels, but better integrated than ever); it has the ripeness of Graciano, which ripens with low yields and only ripens thoroughly in given vintages, and they had to skip warm years like 2011 when some varieties like Graciano and Mazuelo didn't behave well. This is the finest Aro so far.
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Wine Enthusiast
This dark-rubycolored wine has aromas of brambly fruits of the wood, with touches of cedar and violet. Notes of clove and eucalyptus are joined by exquisite flavors of cherry, cassis, dark chocolate and orange zest. Downy tannins carry on into an enduring finish.
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Wine Spectator
A muscular red in a sleek, limber frame, this offers saturated black currant and black cherry fruit flavors, with exotic spice and espresso notes expressing themselves in a modern style. Yet there's undeniable purity, with racy acidity focusing the tightly meshed flavors and dense, chalky tannins. Hints of violet, thyme, iron and spice play on the lasting finish. Tempranillo and Graciano. Best from 2024 through 2034.
Other Vintages
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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.