Deep cherry red in color with pronounced violet undertones. This wine possesses powerful and pure aromas from red fruits, with touches of blue flower as the violet. As the previous years the fine wood aroma is present without being predominant. The palate is intense but not aggressive with persistent tannic finish. Same aromas range as in the nose. This vintage is surprising regarding its evolution in barrel; it carried out its role to set structure during an unusually hot year.
This red wine has no vintage and it is the tribute to tradition. The winery here sought to continue a very old Spanish custom and also to combine the balance between vintages. Traditionally, in Spain, the very few wineries that had a bottling process prepared two types of wines in each harvest: the one of the current year and another wine without a specific harvest, which they called Reserva Especial. It was a mixture of wines from the best harvest from which the most representative wine of the winery was siphoned off. The Reserva Especial is the wine with the greatest personality, it combines the complexity of the Único multiplied by different vintages and provides us with a huge range of aromas, pure elegance in a never-ending flow through the magic of a myth. Only the best Únicos are used to produce Reserva Especial; a mix of years, virtues, experiences and sentiments that serves only to profile the most profound essence of a unique and unrepeatable style, the Vega Sicilia style.
It is the Vega Sicilia flagship. The qualities of the Tempranillo and cabernet sauvignon in different proportions are assembled to perfection in this wine. Each provides a differentiating factor that makes the wine great in every vintage. The vines are grown on plots where the land is located at the point between the slopes down from the wasteland and the alluvial plain. The soil nearest the surface is made out of fine colluvial deposits from the hillside with small fragment of limestone. There is abundant quartz gravel deeper down in a sandy main soil. There are many angular limestone boulders on the surface. Red wine made in controlled fermentation using native yeast in wooden tanks. Malolactic fermentation also takes place in wood. After its fermentation, its goes through what is probably the world's longest ageing of a red wine, almost 10 years between wood and bottle. The different stages take place in different types of barrel: American and French wood, new and used 225-litre barrels, 20,000-litre vats, each batch is what determines the type of wood and the time spent in each container.
harvest by hand in 12-kg boxes and are taken immediately to the winery to the sorting tables. Fermentation takes place in wooden tanks under controlled temperatures until a good polyphenolic structure is obtained which will provide the generous colour and firm structure that makes up part of the personality of this wine; and finally the ageing of between 14 and 20 months, depending on the characteristics of the vintage, is performed in full in new French oak Bordeaux barrels. These barrels, from the leading Bordeaux firms (Radoux, Taranssaud, Saury and Vicard), are a significant investment in oak as, harvest after harvest, all the wine that is produced in Alión will be aged in new barrels that, after the wine is decanted to be bottle, will not be used again by the winery. Once the wine is removed from the barrels, it will remain no less than 15 months in the stillness of the bottle, where it will end up assembling all the primary aromas of the fruit with the hues from its delicate ageing, resulting in an intense, complex and fleshy wine, but where the elegance is a distinguishing feature and hallmark of the winery.