Rioja Reserva, Marques de Murrieta 2022

The flagship white-label Reserva-style red 2022 Marqués de Murrieta wants to showcase the personality of the estate through blending places and grapes. In the 2022 vintage, it's 85% Tempranillo, 7% Mazuelo, 6% Graciano and 2% Garnacha. In the warmer and drier year, with two important heat waves that hurried things up, the grapes were hand-harvested between the 7th and 23rd of September, quite early, and they fermented separately in stainless steel. The wine matured in 225-liter American oak barrels for 25 months.Tasting with Vicente Cebrián, he told me he likes 2022 better than 2023 and 2024, which surprised me (let's see what he tells me next year...). It was a gourmand year, with rounder and glossier wines and with more volume, hedonistic and full. The wine is surprisingly balanced and elegant and doesn't show any excesses; the higher percentages of Mazuelo and Graciano provided the extra freshness needed but also had to age for longer in wood, but the oak is perfectly integrated, and the wine is clean and focused. It has contained ripeness and 14% alcohol, keeping a pH of 3.65 and 5.1 grams of acidity. It's a triumph over the adverse conditions of the year. A total of 867,134 bottles, 20,592 magnums and 14,304 half-liter bottles and a handful of larger formats were produced. It was bottled in May 2025. This wine has increased in quality tremendously in the last few years, which is remarkable for the volume they produce.