Tasting the 2003 Pujanza Rioja
Last Thursday we had the first Tempranillo and tapas night at my house. Several pals dropped by (mostly for the novelty of watching me cook) and tasted a bottle of rioja I’d recently picked up in our local wine emporium. Our rating system is pretty straight forward: the scale is 1-5 stars with one being horridly vile plonk (I’ve judged a few in competitions, though thankfully its rare) and 5 stars which is a wine you should run, not walk, to buy.
The 2003 Pujanza Rioja is a blend of 90% Tempranillo and 10% Graciano. Our consensus is that it has medium bodied aromas of cherry, raspberry and white peppercorn. The predominant flavor is of raw cocoa powder and light red cherry. The wine was served with two Spanish dishes: Plate 1: A mild chorizo baked in a moderately spiced variation of patatas gravas. The wine went very well with this dish. Plate 2: A chicken and spicy chorizo pealla.
The wine as a stand alone and with Plate 1 got a consensus rating of 3.5 stars but with Plate 2 it did not fare as well; the wine simply lacks the body to stand up to the richer flavors in the paella. So for this pairing the wine gets 3 stars.
Overall the 2003 Pujanza Rioja is a decent but unexciting 3.5 star value at $25 so long as its paired with mild dishes.
Where is TryTempranillo going…
Now that Crush 2009 is finally over and I can finally move my arm again, albeit very slowly due to shoulder surgery (and thus can type), I can get back to posting on this site. Over the last couple of weeks whilst stuck in the house recuperating, I’ve had the chance to figure out a little bit on where I want to go with this blog. Most folks at wine tastings that I attend both as a pouring winemaker and those in which I am a casual participant are unfamiliar with Spanish varietal wines…
Taster: “What kind of wine is that?”
Me: “It’s a Tempranillo.”
Taster: “Is that a grape?”
Anyway you get the picture. So I’ve decide that TryTempranillo needs to start off with a tasting and food pairing focus. Beginning this December I will be conducting a weekly Tempranillo wine tasting at my home and pairing the wines to a couple Tapas dishes (Spanish small plates to share among diners) that I’ll be making. There will be a panel of tasters each week- generally about 6-8 of us- and we’ll blog about the experience. You see, different people have different tastes so I want this blog to reflect that. If everybody at the tasting agrees that the wine of the night is awesome, then great; but if it sucks we’ll say so too.
For the record. I’ll be buying the wines and the food. I won’t be pouring Sunfire’s wines. Since Tempranillo is relatively new to wine lovers in this country, my intent is to offer you, my readers, the chance to become more familiar with this amazing grape and to get some sense of where you can fit this wine into your lifestyle. This is meant to be a conversation so I also hope that you will try some of these wines yourself and post your own tasting notes and comments on this blog. I’ll probably twitter about the tastings too- if I can figure out how to. I’m a pretty good taster and winemaker but technology befuddles me 
