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Tasting notes
Located in the foothills of the Sierra de Toloño, the 2020 Yjar – one of Telmo Rodríguez’s many projects – is a wine of exquisite detail. The nose is wonderfully refined with notes of peppery spice, tobacco and wet stone which slowly unfurl in the glass. The palate is similarly precise in its texture with layer upon layer of dark fruit and cassis, leading to a long, linear finish. A wonderfully elegant expression of Rioja, the 2020 is a real success.
Critic scores
Average Score
Colin Hay, The Drinks Business
Jane Anson, Inside Bordeaux
More reviews and scores
Focused crystalline raspberry and cranberry fruit character, savoury, plenty of white pepper and fennel spice, intense, powerful, balanced, nuanced and gripping with a drawn out finish, providing more evidence of this compelling wine. 3.8ha of grapes, field blend. Native yeast fermentation, small size open top wooden vats, goblet trained high altitude vineyard, co-planted with massal selection. Foothills of Sierra de Tolono, 600-800m altitude. A challenging vintage that saw early rain and hail followed by a hot and dry summer, required intuition and rapid response - the kind of growing season that great winemakers rise to meet, as Telmo Rodriguez and Pablo Eguzkiza have done here. Harvest September 30 to October 7.
The nose of the 2020 Yjar developed very floral notes with time in the glass, making it very aromatic, expressive and elegant. This is completely different from the other two reds, as this comes from a specific plot. It reveals the finesse of the marl soils and the austerity of the stones. It was a year of sorting and discarding (they had hail) to achieve the consistency they look for in this wine. The different varieties co-planted in the vineyard fermented together (there's more Garnacha here) in open-top oak vats with indigenous yeasts. The wine matured in foudres and barrels of different sizes for approximately 30 months. It's elegant and clean, with a seamless palate, very fine tannins and a vibrant mouthfeel. 12,656 bottles produced. It was bottled in May 2023.
(Rioja DOC; a blend of Tempranillo, Garnacha, Graciano, Granegro and Rojal; 14% alcohol). Dark berries and black cherries, a little touch of baking spice, but incense too. Graphite. More open-textured at first than Matallana, but the grippy tannins sculpt this drawing the fruit back to the spine and increasing the intensity through the mid-palate. More glacial, sapid and juicy than Matallana, but with considerable density and impact, above all on the finish. Impressive. Very Telmo Rodriguez!
About the producer
In 1994, Telmo Rodríguez and Pablo Eguzkiza made their first wine together. This was the beginning of Compañía de Vinos Telmo Rodríguez, their joint project that looks to uncover the “real” Spain, working with old vineyards and indigenous varieties to recover the nation’s vinous heritage.