Artadi El Carretil Tempranillo 2019
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James
Suckling -
Robert
Parker
Product Details
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James Suckling
A complete, fresh and complex Artadi single-plot wine with lovely subtlety. Spanish cigars, mineral, cocoa powder, some fine herbs, mussels and spices, with a background of fresh yet ripe, concentrated fruit showing crushed blackberries and blueberries. Tight, powerful but still dynamic and silky, with a mineral tinge to the supple fruit core in the middle. Not trying too hard. Impeccable balance with finesse! Tempranillo. From organically grown grapes. Already drinkable now, but better hold for a few years. Best from 2025.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 El Carretil was produced with Tempranillo from a plot of 3.64 hectares planted in the village of Laguardia at three different times—1930, 1975 and 1988—on limestone, sandstone and silt soils with up to 18% active limestone. It fermented in open-top oak vats and went through malolactic fermentation in barrel, where it was kept for nine months. It's mineral, it has energy and tension, it's not heavy, and it has freshness and acidity. It's serious and has very fine, abundant tannins and great balance that should make it age nicely in bottle.
Rating: 96+
Artadi is about purity of extracted fruit with almost Burgundian textures. In fact, critics have often compared these wines to the top wines of Chambolle-Musigny and other top appellations of Burgundy. The key to this level of elegance comes from the cold wines of the Pyrenees which blow from the north. This coupled with moderate temperatures tend to make these wines a study in elegance and power, the iron fist in a velvet glove if you will. They are some of the most extraordinary examples of Tempranillo in the world.
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.