Blame it on Rioja

The other night at Barcelona Restaurant in Greenwich, CT, I found two more wines to add to our growing list of Rioja wines that retail for less than $20 and also deliver great value.

The CVNE Monopole Blanco 2005 kicked ass I thought. As Gretchen pointed out, it was from a vintage older than what’s typically hitting the market, and that extra bottle age gave it some slight oxidative character and seemed to highlight its white peach/white flower prettiness. A great ’sipper’ or simple drinking wine, what to have while you’re cooking, and a nice match for pan roasted trout. I am sure the 2007s are just as pleasant, but it’d be worthwhile to search out some bottles of the ‘05.

I also really liked the Abando 2001 Crianza from the house of Santiago Ijalba. The ’01s are living up to their buzz in pretty much all categories (check out a recent article on the 2001 vintage in Rioja) and this one from Rioja Alta has all its ducks in a row: quaffable but with well integrated oak, both French and American, pleaant acidity, and great persistence for a crianza. Lots of raspberry and blackberry. It’s one of Barcelona’s house pours, and Gretchen admitted to snatching up a large number of cases from T. Edward, the wine’s importer and distributor, but a quick search on wine-searcher yielded a few places across the country which still carry it, including a Connecticut-based online purveyor where it’s selling it for less than $20, making it our second bang for the buck this week.

Santiago Ijalba Rioja Crianza 2001 is $18.99/btl at biggourmet.com

CVNE Monopole Rioja Blanco 2005 is $14.10/btl at winesellerz.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Red Wine, Retailers, Rioja in the News, Rioja on the Web, Tastings, Value Watch, White Wine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.