Señorio de Pecina, Rioja Gran Reserva

Few can argue that Rioja is Spain’s greatest gift to the world of wine, and this bottle is the kind of quiet masterpiece that proves it. The 2016 vintage—one of the finest of the last few decades, spoken of in the same breath as 2004 and 2010—gave Peciña the perfect conditions to produce what every Rioja traditionalist still dreams about: a wine that smells not of factories or flash, but of sour plum sauce and crushed flowers, slow-braised meats, red cherries left to dry on a windowsill, and the dusty perfume of old barrels resting in cold stone cellars. This is Rioja in its most classic, undisturbed form. And the fact that a wine of this pedigree still sells for this price? That’s a small miracle. Each year I’m handed a parade of “modern” Riojas—monuments to new oak, over-ripeness, and ambition, wines that taste more like sweetened coconut-vanilla plum cocktails than anything grown in Rioja. Peciña refuses that world entirely. Here, the fruit has pulse and lift, the texture is rustic in the most flattering way, and the aromas unwind on their own schedule, like an old storyteller who knows you’ll listen if the tale is good enough. After nearly a decade of silent aging, this Gran Reserva is entering its prime—fully awake, fully expressive—yet still capable of aging effortlessly for decades if you have the patience (or the cellar space). If you want Rioja the way it was meant to taste—authentic, mature, quietly aristocratic, and gloriously indifferent to trends—this is the bottle.

Señorío de Peciña was founded in 1992 by Pedro Benjamín Peciña, who spent years tending the vineyards at La Rioja Alta before establishing his own bodega in San Vicente de la Sonsierra—one of the most prized villages in Rioja Alta, framed by the Sierra Cantabria and the slow bend of the Ebro River. The landscape here is a patchwork of old goblet-trained vines rooted in limestone and clay, looking out toward the historic towns of Haro and Logroño, where Rioja’s long-aging traditions were born in the nineteenth century and perfected in the twentieth. This is the cradle of “classic Rioja,” where cooling mountain winds and slow ripening give Tempranillo its balance, and where American oak—not French—became the signature seasoning of the region’s greatest wines. Rather than chase modern extraction, technology, or trend, the Peciña family remained loyal to the old Rioja order: long maturation, gradual evolution, and the belief that wine is not built in months, but in years.

The 2016 Gran Reserva is built from the estate’s oldest bush-trained vineyards—95 percent Tempranillo with small amounts of Graciano and Garnacha for lift and structure. The grapes are hand-harvested, fermented with native yeasts, and macerated for roughly twelve days at controlled temperatures. After fermentation, the wine begins its long rest: four full years in used American-oak barrels, with gravity racking every six months (“trasiego”), a centuries-old Rioja method that gently clarifies and polishes the wine without pumps or filtration. Once removed from barrel, it spends a minimum of three additional years aging in bottle before release—meeting, and in practice exceeding, the legal definition of Gran Reserva. No new-oak gloss, no shortcuts, no stainless-steel urgency—just patience, oxygen, and time doing the work that machines cannot.

Now nearly a decade past harvest, the 2016 pours deep ruby-garnet with a soft brick rim—the visual signature of slow evolution and a hallmark of Gran Reserva Rioja. The nose is textbook old-school Rioja: dried cherry, plum sauce, rose petal, cedar, pipe tobacco, tea leaf, orange peel, cured meat, and a whisper of coconut from the old American oak. The palate is rich, supple yet structured, with fine, resolved tannins and layers of spiced plum, leather, red berries, savory herbs, and a long finish that feels equal parts silk and stone. It is drinking beautifully now after a brief decant, but will continue gaining nuance and quiet nobility well into the 2040s. Serve at 60–65 °F in large stems with roast lamb, aged Manchego, grilled mushrooms, paella, or nothing more than a quiet night and a glass big enough to let it breathe. Rioja like this isn’t meant to be rushed—it’s meant to be listened to.