Marqués de Riscal 2003 Reserva

The Winery: Marqués de Riscal
The Wine: 2003 Reserva
The Price: $16.99 on sale at QFC (regular price is $24.99).

The use of superlatives in the name of the wine means different things depending on the origin of the wine. This wine is from Spain where Reserva is a regulated term to indicate that the wine has been aged longer in the barrel and in the bottle before being released. The Reserva from Marqués de Riscal spends nearly two years in American Oak barrels before bottling.

This wine comes with a wire net around the bottle. So far as I can tell the net serves only to dress up the bottle. One thing that I've noticed about the wines that I've purchased from Spain is that the corks tend to be less snug in the bottle than American wines. They're not loose, but they don't have the same death-grip on the bottle like many American wines. I've been thinking a lot about how wine is capped, so if I can find some meaningful information, perhaps that would be in interesting topic for a future post.

On to the wine.

This wine is a dark ruby color. The predominant scent is prune followed by blackberry with a chocolate undertone.

The wine has a sweeter taste than I expected. It has prune and berry flavors with a bit of a bite. It's a good wine now, but I think that an additional few years of aging would improve it, bringing it from a good wine to a great wine. If I were serving it today, I would pair it with something fairly substantial that could hold up to its bold flavors - maybe spaghetti with a hearty sauce or maybe even chili (gasp...did the heathen just suggest wine with chili?).

I think this is a wine I'll stock up on to see how well it really does age. My expectation is that it will age very well.