Description
95-97 Points | The Wine Advocate, Luis Gutiérrez
The unbottled 2023 San Lázaro shows a nose of ripe berry fruit—black rather than red—with an earthy touch and a little darker in all senses than the bottled 2022 I tasted next to it. There is a faint earthiness and perhaps iron, meat or blood-like touch here. It has 14.4% alcohol and a fine-boned palate with fine-grained tannins, subdued chalky minerality, the Laguardia elegance and this plot's length. Since 2022, all of the plots include the white grapes that are planted in the vineyard together with the Tempranillo. They expect to fill some 4,000 bottles around May or June 2025.
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.