2020 Valenciso Cemento, Rioja

Tasted as a pre-bottling sample, but I'm confident that this second vintage of Cemento will deliver in the bottle. Dense, perfumed and smooth, with good underlying grip, plum, rosemary and wild thyme flavours and a sappy finish. Delicious.

94 points Tim Atkin MW Rioja 2023 Special Report

Organic.From humble beginnings, Valenciso has risen to become a leading light among Rioja’s small yet growing band of terroir-focused producers. The vineyards and cellar are located in the far north of Rioja Alta in Ollauri, a small village four kilometres from Haro. In part of what has been proposed as the Western Sonsierra zone (by Alberto Gil and Antonio Remesal Villar in their compelling new volume—Rioja: Vinos Silenciosos), Ollauri’s vineyards are noted for their excellent calcário soils, altitudes of up to 600 meters and Atlantic-influenced climate. These factors are responsible for imparting depth and finesse into the Rioja Alta’s northern Tempranillo.

 A distinctive feature of Valenciso’s approach in the cellar has been the widespread use of concrete tanks for fermentation, a practise which allows for a gentler extraction of fruit and colour. Concrete vats were once a mainstay in Rioja, yet by the by the 1980s the tradition of fermenting and aging in cement vessels had largely been replaced by stainless steel and oak maturation. Today, thanks to its numerous advantages and a group of specialist manufacturers, concrete has found itself right back at the forefront of fashion.

 While all Valenciso’s wines see the inside of some concrete during their élevage, this new bottling, as the name suggests, has been fermented and raised entirely in concrete vats. It’s 100% Tempranillo drawn from a group of old-vine vineyards nestled in the limestone-rich hillsides of Haro and Ollauri. All up, this was aged for 30 months before bottling, resulting in a wonderfully bright and complex wine with wild blackberry and plum characters, laced with hints of black pepper in an elegant and rounded palate with fine, lingering tannins.