Max. 1 bottle per order. This wine is only available with the purchase of 12 bottles of Tondonia Reserva.
A unique white Rioja made from 90% Viura and 10% Malvasia which, quite unusually in a modern society with an increasing need for rapid cash flow, is only released when it is ready to drink.
Viña Tondonia Blanco Reserva 2013 has spent 6 years in cask and 5 years in bottle under perfect conditions in Tondonia’s cellars before release.
Only a small part of the Tondonia vineyard is planted with white grapes, so production and sales of this wine are unfortunately always strictly rationed.
The white reserva is spontaneously fermented in old 6,000-litre wooden vats and then aged in ancient 225-litre American oak barriques. All casks come from the estate’s own cooperage, where today’s main work consists of restoring and maintaining the old barrels. Filtration is not used – instead, the wine is racked a couple of times a year, and fining is carried out in the old-fashioned way with egg whites before bottling directly from cask.
The estate’s wines are primarily about complex ageing aromas (tertiary aromas), and this unique white wine presents itself with an impossible combination of vibrant acidity and an extraordinarily complex expression of age. Despite its considerable age, Viña Tondonia Reserva Blanco is, relative to its potential, still only in its youth, and the most devoted fans will probably prefer to cellar the wine for a few more years. Until then, the nose and palate offer preserved lemon, wax, orange peel, chamomile, fennel and honeysuckle, while the oxidative rancio character has yet to emerge. The acidity is prominent, so everything appears slender and strikingly focused. The palate is dry and lightly full-bodied with excellent length and purity. This wine is entirely about ageing aromas, many of them oxidative: only the acidity is youthful.
If you prefer razor-sharp, crisp and fruity white wine, then you were probably not looking for this wine in the first place, and in any case it is not one you simply stumble across on shop shelves.
Remember to serve the wine in a generous wine glass at a serving temperature of 13–16°C, in other words somewhat warmer than most people would serve white wine.
The ageing potential is considerable – it can be measured in decades, but 25–35 years after the vintage is typically a good age, depending on the nature of the vintage.
94 points Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate (Luís Gutierrez)
