February 9, 2024 - Purchased from a private cellar in storage facility. Good fill, one finger from cork. Under the wax seal, the cork is soaked through. Wine was overly brown and oxidized, tasted dull and bitter, this wine has collapsed. Bummed.
January 6, 2024 - Wine is in a truly excellent place. Decanted for about 4 hours. Poised. Complete. Complex. Cedary/leathery noise Extremely well balanced with a pronounced, substantial inner core of bright red fruit from the garnacha. Everything you want with a mature Lopez -- on a high plateau of maturity that should hold for quite some time. No rush to enjoy but no reason not to. Perfect wine for a dreary wet winter's night.
November 17, 2023 - Simply delicious. Deep, red color, though a nice clear tone. Very complex fruit with notes of leather and beautiful red fruit flavors. Oak is still present, but very fine grained and doesn’t detract at all. Long finish. This is in an excellent place, but will last for many years. A treat to enjoy now. Decanted for two hours, then consumed over an additional two hours. 94++
October 6, 2023 - A Medlar lunch (Medlar, London): Served single blind with the 94 Riserva. A little flatter and more subdued on the nose with a touch of vanilla. More precision and a bit more acidity here, more energy. Really quite vibrant. This continues the progression of this wine over the past decade, bottles every three years or so have been getting steadily better. ****1/2. Interesting to compare this and the 94 Reserva, blind. It was an easy pair to separate, the R having more fruit on the nose, but the GR more acidity, line and energy on the palate and a little more oak influence apparent on the nose.
July 23, 2023 - Totally saturated cork under wax cap but perfectly intact and easily extracted. Totally transparent and almost watery faded damask colour… looks much older than a 1994. Nose is immediately high lifted piano notes of bitter orange marmalade but mellows within 2 hours in the glass into soft, perfumed musk, dried spices and rich dried red plums fruit. Palate is sharp, tart bitter orange marmalade with high acidity and light but very dry tannins but which segue into a cranberry sharpness but with a counterpoint of rounded confit plum and less dry than earlier. Really multi-dimensional and contemplative on the long, resonant finale. Gorgeous. No rush if you have this in your cellar but is fully open for business.93+
April 21, 2023 - With FC and AW and Hispania. Aromatic with dried red fruit, lots of tobacco, soil. Medium bodied, cool fruited, elegant, puts on a little weright with time in glass, lovely line and length, light almost fully resolved tannins, hallmark salinity also present, vibrant acidity, long dinish. Outstanding, now drinking well but of course no hurry.
April 9, 2023 - My last 4 bottles consumed 🥲 Fantastic wine.
April 4, 2023 - Truly amazing, just kept improving with air... and then it was gone.
March 23, 2023 - Tondonia Gran Reserva 1934 - 1973 - 1994: From 75cl, rotten cork under wax capsule literally disintegrated into little pieces on extraction, my 5th bottle of this vintage in succession to be deficient in this way. Decanted and followed over 3 hours. Muted aromatics, perhaps a hint of chlorine bleach, alas nothing positive worth reporting here. Bright Tondonia acidity on the squeaky-textured entry, with a "youthful" thickness to the mid-palate, and some fine dark berry fruit coming as a bit of a shock after the featherlight 1973 tasted alongside. Why LdH chose to seal their premium product with such lousy corks in this vintage I don't know, but it's incredibly annoying to have bought more than a case of 1994 GR and keep on opening bottles which might have been outstanding, but just aren't, almost certainly due to the appalingly bad corks used. The 1934 two glasses down this mini-vertical boasted more concentrated and frankly fresher dark-red mid-palate fruit, despite being 60 years older. Perhaps this shows the difference between a truly great and a merely very good vintage? But perhaps also the difference between a functional cork (1934) and a spongey mess (1994)? 88-89P(?)
December 31, 2022 - Decanted for 1 hour. Some bricking. Subtle nose and still fruit on palate with some secondary flavours. A bit disappointing compared to previous bottles. Drink up or just not a great bottle?