La Rioja Alta Viña Alberdi Selección Especial Rioja Reserva 2021
£19.75
The wine
Viña Alberdi is the house's entry into Reserva and among the best-value Rioja made by anyone. Expect red cherry and dried strawberry with the vanilla and coconut that American oak gives, over silky tannins and a savoury, balanced finish.
La Rioja Alta was founded in 1890 by five families and remains one of the most traditional houses in the region. Reserva requires three years of ageing, at least one in cask, and the house typically exceeds the minimum considerably. The wines are racked by hand from barrel to barrel rather than filtered, a practice almost nobody still follows.
The producer
La Rioja Alta
View all La Rioja Alta winesFounded in 1890 in the old railway quarter of Haro by five families, among them the Aranas, the Ardanzas and the Alberdis whose names are still on the labels. La Rioja Alta remains one of the great traditional houses of the region.
Haro's Barrio de la Estación is a remarkable place: half a dozen of Rioja's most historic bodegas sit within a few hundred metres of one another, built there in the 1890s to be beside the railway that carried wine to Bordeaux after phylloxera destroyed the French vineyards. That crisis is why Rioja modernised when it did, and French merchants brought barrel-ageing with them.
The house style is built on long cask ageing and on releasing wines only when they are judged ready, which can mean a decade or more after the harvest. Barrels are racked by hand and by gravity, and the cooperage is done in-house. The numbered wines, 904 and 890, take their names from the years the estate acquired other bodegas, and are made only in exceptional vintages.
