Description
95 Points | The Wine Advocate, Luis Gutiérrez
The bottled version of the 2023 La Hoya feels quite serious and harmonious. It spent its first winter in 500- and 600-liter barrels and the second one in a 4,000-liter oak foudre. The nose is quite subtle and a little shy, with finesse. The top part of the plot is sandy, and the lower part has more silt; the combination gives the wine fruit and structure. It also has a lot of limestone and comes through as very balanced too. It's medium-bodied and really fine-boned. This is now showing much better than anticipated. 5,232 bottles produced. It was bottled in May 2025. This and Carretil could be the highlights from the 2023s.
Artadi still sells their wines without the Rioja appellation of origin, but they are still located in the heart of Rioja. So, their wines appear in this article like always, because I include wines from the region whether or not they carry the appellation of origin on their labels. They keep working their 56 hectares of vineyards in the villages of Laguardia and El Villar to produce between 100,000 and 120,000 bottles. Their cellar has changed when it comes to the containers where they age their wines, as they no longer have any 225-liter barrels and instead have 120 600-liter demi-muids, 30 500-liter demi-muids and four oak vats ranging between 3,000 and 5,000 liters. Everything has been certified organic since 2016, even though they started working organically in 2007.
I tasted with Carlos López de Lacalle, second generation in the winery. Carlos has started to change the style of the wines in 2023 and 2024, harvesting earlier, using larger-volume containers and giving the wines a longer élevage for the micro-oxygenation part but not for the aromas or flavors. The aim is to obtain fine-boned wines with freshness, and he finds that in the wines from 2024. We tasted the bottled 2023s and unbottled samples of the 2024s, except for the 2024 white, which was already in bottle. 2023 was warm, and 2024 was cooler and with a lot of rain in September. La Hoya and El Carretil could be the highlights from the 2023s. He likes 2024 very much, which he calls a textbook vintage. Like last time, we tasted by village: La Hoya, Quintanilla and La Poza de Ballesteros are in Elvillar, a village where the wines show more fruit, and darker fruit too; and Valdeginés, San Lázaro, El Carretil and El Pisón are in Laguardia, a village with finer-boned and mineral, profound wines. The wines from Laguardia tend to have more elegance, while Elvillar has more ripeness.