2/23/2016 - Ben85 Likes this wine:

Sausage & Mash Dinner: Great wine and what great value too! Bought from Majestic for £20 years ago. Still a great wine, truly classic Rioja and at its peak now, I would suggest. Superb nose with classic strawberry, vanilla and spice. Palate a little faded relative to the nose, but still overall great stuff.

12/20/2015 - Ben85 Likes this wine:

This is certainly a good wine. £13 at Majestic makes it good value. But I think the Mencia grape can be so much more elegant than this. There is too much extraction here, and too much oak. I'm sure it is only a tiny fraction of new oak but the wine doesn't appreciate it in my view. I think of a lot of over-worked wines from languedoc, at this level, which get too smokey and clumsy when married with oak when they should really just save themselves some cash and concentrate on the varietal. I would prefer this producer to dial it down a little and let the grape and the soil speak for themselves.

11/23/2015 - Ben85 Likes this wine:

Very clearly syrah. Nice medium body, very light on its feet, quite nimble, and everything very well judged. Cherry, pink peppercorns, dried red flowers. Delicious now. £15 pound at Majestic. Great Value.

1/1/2015 - olemski wrote:

Barely acceptable. Fine on the nose, thin, ungenerous and short in the mouth. Just like the three other bottles I've had.

7/27/2015 - Ben85 wrote:

Fruit on the dark side, ripe black cherry and a meaty note later on. Decanted an hour then, drank over 4 hours. Very tight on opening and tanin is too high, I thought it would resolve itself over a few hours but it never really got going for me. Drank one before Christmas and the same complaint. There is some good complexity, but the structure doesn't work for me but still perfectly enjoyable. Probably needs more time, but will that make it better?