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Artadi Valdegines 2022
Artadi Valdegines 2022

Artadi Valdegines 2022

$92.00

Description
94 Points | The Wine Advocate, Luis Gutiérrez

The 2022 Valdeginés comes from a warm and dry year and fermented in open-top oak vats and matured in barrels and nine months in demi-muids. However, the wine has more freshness than expected, and the nose comes through as fresher than that of the 2023 I tasted next to it. This vineyard has an east exposure and soil with a higher percentage of clay, with limestone one meter down that gives it punch. It has very fine, chalky tannins. Like many 2022s, it finished in the higher part of the estimated window last year. 14,000 bottles produced. It was bottled in June 2024.

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.

This time, we tasted by village: La Hoya, Quintanilla and La Poza de Ballesteros are in Elvillar, and Valdeginés, San Lázaro, El Carretil and El Pisón are in Laguardia. The wines from Laguardia tend to have more elegance, while Elvillar has more ripeness. I tasted the bottled 2022s and unbottled samples of the 2023s. Both years were warm and dry. The key difference in 2023 was the rain in early September, which changed the character of the year despite the 254 liters in total rainfall, half of the annual average, so yields were lower; but the wines, from grapes harvested until mid-October, are fresher, elegant and more fluid, yet there's a higher sense of ripeness and darker color (and aromas) in the 2023s. 2022 has turned out much better than expected. The wines have red fruit, low-ish pH and more delicacy than you'd think because of the extreme warm and dry year. Carlos has started to change the style of the wines in 2023 and 2024, harvesting earlier, using larger volumes and giving the wines a longer élevage for the micro-oxygenation part but not for the aromas or flavors. But 2023 was warm, and 2024 was cooler and with a lot of rain in September. He likes 2024 very much, which he calls textbook. I look forward to tasting them next year.

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