Rioja + Reserva

Year 13, No. 12

Hello and welcome back from summer holidays!

I know, I know, my American readers will be grumbling about how Europeans take the entire month of August off.

While myths are always amusing to keep going, the sweaty truth is that most people only take off at most two weeks (except for the exceedingly-lazy Cul de Cuvée (*) staff.) But given that they’ll take them at either the beginning or end of the month, it ultimately makes for an overall black hole of productivity for the entire month.

You know who didn’t get August off? Winemakers!

Everything is GO GO GO around here, especially in terms of the harvest which has seen the whites arrive long ago and a great many of the reds have already come in. Some producers are even saying they’ve fully finished with everything. As mentioned a few weeks back, this is just a one-way ticket to Crazy Town.

After a brief pause on regular articles we’re back up and running with the full Rioja Regional Report and Tasting Report available for paid subscribers. Lots of analysis in there about vintage and current trends, but especially taking a deeper look at the category of “Reserva” and what that even means anymore.

While not publishing regularly, we made use of that bit of downtime to improve upon a number of website functions, especially the wine search which has been massively enhanced for paid subscribers in terms of features. This couldn’t have come at a better moment as I’ve largely caught up on the backlog of tasting notes so that the database now has over 8,100 wines scored and rated.

With 60% of these reviews for Spanish wines, this makes it one of the most extensive online references for wines of the country.

Drink well, be well.

-Miquel

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