A 96-pointer library Rioja under $50 a bottle! How many of such gems remain out there? Not many.

Hard to believe this is from 15 years ago - doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?!

Anyhow, it’s in such a SWEET SPOT now that when the opportunity to secure a few cases exclusively for our Store came about, no wasn’t an answer.

Part of the Sierra Cantabria portfolio of properties overflowing with superstars, Viñedos de Páganos is according to *Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate *“a small winery belonging to the Eguren family in the Alavesa part of Rioja, in the village of Paganos, Laguardia, where they had family vineyards. They built a small winery excavating new caves, some of them underneath the vineyards. They produce two single-vineyard wines there, El Puntido and La Nieta, but the news is that since 2005 there are two versions of El Puntido as in that vintage they started producing a Gran Reserva versions of it. Did I mention that tradition and modernity seem to be converging?”

Good question and the answer is YES as far as this stunner is concerned, grab all you can so that you can enjoy the lengthy review below without the fear of it selling out.

96 Points – Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate

“Putting my nose in the glass of the 2007 El Puntido Gran Reserva transported me to the classical Riojas from yesteryear. The wine has a fully developed nose with all the textbook descriptors of a good, aged Rioja - forest floor, cigar ash, cold bonfire, truffle, cherries in liqueur, blonde tobacco, spices and iodine. But this is a classical Gran Reserva that has something that was not that traditional, and it comes from a single vineyard and matured in brand new French oak barrels for 28 months. But time in bottle has polished it (it was bottled in June 2010, almost nine years ago); the tannins are mostly resolved and it’s nicely textured. It has what I love about the best red wine - it’s salty rather than sweet, there is no room for sweetness here, and it’s sapid and tasty and has great balance and freshness. This is developing at a very slow pace and should continue doing so for a very long time. A great Gran Reserva in the making. Only 5,000 bottles were produced from 2007, a very cold vintage, when the grapes were harvested the last three days of October, and it snowed the first of November! Drink: 2019-2032.”