2007 López de Heredia "Viña Tondonia" Reserva Rioja

Following the appreciation of the 2007 vintage from María José López de Heredia, the red 2007 Viña Tondonia Reserva is showing great, revealing unusual finesse and elegance. The nose is a little reticent but nuanced and complex, a little shy rather than explosive. The palate is medium-bodied, and the tannins are very refined. This has to be one of the finest vintages of Viña Tondonia Reserva of recent years. 200,000 bottles produced. It was bottled in November 2015. (LG) (6/2019)

This wine spends six years in barrique (tradtionally it needed six winters to stabilize naturally), before racking into large casks and then bottling three years before the expected release. Attractive, dark earth and dried sage with a strong aroma of attractive, rich dried cherries, as well as blackberries and hints of cedar, cigar tobacco and fresh leather. The palate has a smooth array of fine but quite powerful tannin that builds seamlessly into the long, rich, dark cherry-flavored finish. Great wine! Drink or hold. (7/2019)

Limpid red. An intensely perfumed bouquet evokes raspberry, cherry cola, potpourri and exotic spices, with a vanilla topnote and a smoky mineral flourish. Sweet and focused in the mouth, offering sappy red fruit, spicecake, mocha and rose pastille flavors that flesh out on the back half. Finishes very long and spicy, with a resonating floral note, well-knit tannins and a touch of medicinal herbs. (JR) (4/2021)

Viña Tondonia is a collection of parcels centered on a rise above the Ebro River, where it forms a wide loop outside of Haro. The López de Heredia family farms these parcels as bush vines, blending their fruit into long-lived, vineyard-designated wines. This vintage, including 70 percent tempranillo and 20 percent garnacha with a little graciano and mazuelo, is a lovely, elegant Rioja in a classical mode. There is something magical about well-aged Rioja, and there is often something magical about Viña Tondonia, suggested by this wine’s gentle, lasting touch of bright, sunny cherry notes and deep earth tones, the flavors delicately saturated. Get some. (12/2019)

The 2007 Viña Tondonia Rioja 'Reserva' from López de Heredia is the newest release of this bottling into the market- one has to love a winery that gives a wine twelve years’ aging in the cellars prior to letting it out to slake a thirsty world! The 2007 Viña Tondonia 'Reserva' is still emphatically a young wine, despite it being thirteen years of age now, and though it is very tasty, it is still in climbing mode and will be even better with more bottle age. The wine comes in at a classic thirteen percent octane and offers up a lovely bouquet of raspberries, cherries, cigar wrapper, lovely soil tones, adolescent Rioja spices tones, coconutty American oak and a smoky topnote. On the palate the wine is pure, full-bodied, tangy and still modestly tannic, with a good core, lovely structure and focus and a long, nascently complex and very well-balanced finish. This is quite tasty in its relative youth, but will be even better five or ten years down the road. Fine juice. (1/2020)