John Gilman 94+ pts!  Bodegas Riojanas’ 2017 Monte Real Gran Reserva is a touch riper than the Viña Albina Gran Reserva in this vintage, coming in at a full fourteen percent octane this year. The wine is made entirely form tempranillo, all grown in the estate’s El Monte vineyard. The wine is aged for three years in a fifty-fifty blend of American and French oak, two hundred and twenty-five liter casks. The first year of élevage is done in new oak, with the wine then racked into older barrels for the following two years of aging. The wine delivers a superb bouquet of sweet dark berries, black cherries, a hint of pomegranate, cigar ash, a beautifully complex base of soil tones, clove-like Rioja spices, just a touch of meatiness and cedary oak. On the palate the wine is deep, pure, full-bodied and complex, with a beautiful core of fruit, fine soil inflection and grip, ripe, buried tannins and a long, tangy and impeccably balanced finish. This is certainly approachable today, but the wine is still in climbing mode and I would try to tuck it away in the cellar for at least another six or seven years and let its underlying tannins continue to soften up a bit more. This is first class juice! (Drink between 2031 - 2085)