2004 Fernandez de Pierola Rioja Gran Reserva

This mature wine pours a brick color and shows refined aromas of cherry preserves, toasted cedar, dried dill, and baked raspberry. The fully integrated palate has impressive richness but no sharp angles and instead luxuriously coats the mouth with a mélange of herbs and berry fruit. 

Founded in 1996, the Fernandez de Pierola winery is a very small production family owned and operated winery in Moreda which is a small region in Rioja Alavesa. The family owns 30 acres of vineyards and focuses on 100% Tempranillo for its reds. Wanting to express the terroir of the small Moreda region, the family only uses grapes from Moreda with 50% being estate and the remaining coming from neighbors.
A combination of French and American oak for the cooperage with the majority of the fruit coming from the family’s 60 year old Tempranillo vines.

This philosophy of ‘pago’, of correlation vineyard – wine, is fundamental in our judgment in order for the wines to acquire their distinctive personality and to reflect the singular characteristics where they come from. 
Because of that, our Winery is supplied only with grapes originating from Moreda’s vineyards, 50 % from our own and the rest from other growers.

The singular microclimatic conditions that enjoy our vineyards (moderated rainfall; 450 l/m2, fragile areas, a great part of they in hillsides orientated towards the south, which allows a suitable luminosity, poor, clayey – calcareous soils, of scarce production, important temperature jumps between day and night….) are those that allow that our Tempranillo variety reach its ideal ripeness.
This is a traditional winemaking land with smallholdings run by farmers whose techniques have been passed down over generations from fathers to sons. In addition, they have been able to integrate and adapt scientific oenological advances in order to develop quality-based viticulture.

The vineyards are planted in “Marco Real” (square planting system) and “Marco Rectangular” (rectangular planting system), middle density (about 3,200 vines/ha), free trained and goblet-pruned in three branches, soil tilling, manual green pruning –trimming, bud pruning and tipping-treatments kept to the minimum using sulphur (Oidium) and copper sulphate (Mildew), careful manual harvesting, small carts for the transport of the grapes…
With this wine culture and a poor clay-calcareous soil, the tempranillo variety finds an ideal habitat to develop a truly remarkable profile, giving red wine a fruity, elegant and balanced profile.