2018 Marques de Murrieta Gran Reserva

They don't produce every wine every year (they skipped this wine in challenging 2017), so the 2018 Gran Reserva follows the 2016. In 2018, a cooler year, they produced it with a selection of the best wines from the year, and the breakdown is 87% Tempranillo, 8% Graciano and 5% Mazuelo (Cariñena) picked between the first and 20th of October, late in a slow-ripening year. It fermented in stainless steel but aged separately by variety in American oak barrels, 25 months this year, blended and kept in concrete until bottling. It's a modern rendition of the old classical Gran Reserva, clean, complex, aromatic, expressive and open, with the logical development time brings, with great balance and freshness in this cooler year. It comes in at 14.2% alcohol with a pH of 3.65. This will be the last vintage of this wine as such, from 2019 onward it will be replaced by another concept of Gran Reserva from one single vineyard that is planted exclusively with Tempranillo and Graciano in the Valsalado lieu-dit. 13,786 bottles and 600 magnums were produced. It was bottled in May 2021.