A great white Rioja is back in stock!
Comparable to the great white wines of Burgundy.
Rioja is of course first and foremost the home of Tempranillo.
Many of our great red wines come from this region.
What many people do not know is that this famous region also produces a small amount of white wine.
Abel Mendoza is one of the pioneers of great white wines from Rioja.
Yes, the same Abel we recently called the godfather of Rioja’s new generation of winemakers.
He was one of the first to produce top-quality white wines from his old vines.
And there are quite a few of them. The problem is that the white varieties are often mixed among the Tempranillo vines.
Harvesting them separately and vinifying them on their own is therefore a painstaking job.
We are now seeing a growing trend among younger winemakers to simply blend the white grapes with the reds, including during vinification.
These are the so-called ‘field blends’, based on the idea that a small proportion of white grapes can bring extra finesse and balance to a red wine.
And that often works very well, but we are still very happy that Abel continues to make his white wines!
And we are certainly not the only ones! Year after year, the wines of Abel and Maite receive top scores. The 2025s have not yet been rated, as they have only just been bottled and arrived with us, but they generally score between 94 and 96/100!
This puts them among the most highly regarded white wines in Spain, but also among the rarest. Production is extremely limited, as is our allocation for Belgium.
This is especially true of his flagship wine, 5V, a highly sought-after white Rioja with a distinctly ‘Burgundian’ character.