Winery: Bodegas Luis Cañas                                     

Region: Rioja Alavesa

Vintage: 2020                                                

Bottle: 75 cl                                                   

Grape Varieties: 75% Tempranillo, 20% Graciano and 5% Viura

Type: Red Wine, oak-aged

Alcohol Volume: 14.5% vol.

Serving Temperature: 16º - 18º

A single-estate wine from Luis Cañas, born as a tribute to all their ancestors' winegrowers, a generation of winegrowers that have worked, pampering and preserving the Rioja Alavesa vineyard in all its splendour, placing it among one of the most recognised wine regions worldwide.

With this wine, they want to go back to the origins of the Rioja Alavesa’s winemaking, a wine that transmits all the diversity of the vineyard where it comes from, with the fruit as the main star of the wine. Finca El Palacio is a small vineyard composed of three terraces, each one with different orientation and slope gradients, planted in 1969, mostly with Tempranillo vines and, in smaller proportion, Graciano and Viura.

Production: 

The harvest is done manually; the grapes go through a double selection process at the sorting table. The bunches of the three varieties are processed all together, as it used to be done in the past, and then the grapes are fermented whole, to preserve the fruit aromas, in a French oak vat and aged in 500-litre barrel where they spend 14 months. Bottled in September 2022, commencing then the stage of its ageing in bottle. Total production of 6446 bottles.

Tasting Notes: 

Clean, fresh, and lively red wine, intense and elegant, with the liveliness of the fruit standing out, especially stone fruit aromas with a spicy nuance and aromatic plants, thyme and rosemary. On the palate, it shows a creamy, rich character and good concentration, a marked personality accompanied all the way by a vibrant acidity.

Note: Delicious upon release, although it shows a good ageing potential.

Bodegas Luis Cañas is located in the heart of the highly acclaimed wine region known as the Rioja Alavesa. It is a family-owned winery devoted to winemaking and viticulture for over two centuries, although it was only in 1970, with the commercialisation of its first bottled wines, that the winery took off. Throughout the 1990s, a bigger emphasis was given to the production of good-quality wines, consequently experiencing a rise in sales and becoming what it is today: one of the leading wineries in the Rioja Alavesa. 

The winery owns 90 ha of vines and works another 200 ha under contract, all of them spread out over 870 mostly small-sized parcels of advanced age and planted on poor, chalky clay soil and mostly on slopes and terraces. The result is low yields of excellent quality.