Muga Selección Especial 2020 Rioja - Spain

Mint, blackberries, cocoa powder, graphite, black pepper and roasted dark spices. Full-bodied and juicy, with lots of tannins that are quite sinewy and fine-grained. Really long. Needs at least two more years to come around. Tempranillo, garnacha, Mazuelo and Graciano. Drink after 2026.

Their most gastronomical red is the 2020 Selección Especial, a blend of the four traditional varieties from Rioja—Tempranillo, Garnacha Tinta, Mazuelo and Graciano—fermented in oak vats. Half of the destemmed grapes were put through an optical sorting machine. The wine matured in French oak barrels, 40% of them new, for 26 months and was racked every eight to nine months. 2020 was a warm year, and the wine comes in at 14.5% alcohol, with a pH of 3.56 and 5.75 grams of acidity. Manu Muga likes 2020 very much and says it's a year that suffers because it's in between 2019 and 2021. This is also a textbook example of this wine, a little more developed and tertiary, with generous spice and toast and a palate with more grip. The tannins are not as precise and elegant as those from 2021 (yeah, it suffers in the comparison), but it's a very worthy wine.