A rare, complex Spanish white wine from Rioja Alavesa, made to age.
Half of this wine spent a year in new French oak, the rest in a raw concrete egg, and you can feel both in the glass: real weight and texture, without the fruit going soft or blowsy. What holds it together is a fine mineral thread running underneath, clay and limestone soils coming through in a wine that feels tightly wound rather than showy. It's dense and layered straight out of the bottle, so give it air; our buyer, tasting it back in March, reckoned it needed a proper decant to show what it's really made of. Once it opens up there's genuine depth, the kind of white you sit with for an hour rather than drink in a couple of gulps. High natural acidity keeps the whole thing precise and fresh rather than heavy, and it has real ageing potential, so there's no rush to open it.
Top food pairings:
"The whole team's been excited about this one. Koldo's put five generations of Rioja know-how into these vines: the white grapes actually grow at the top of his red plots, some of them over eighty years old, which says a lot about how much he cares about getting this one right. It's not a bottle for a quick glass after work. Open it and take your time with some nice food and no distractions."
UKAN Winery is a young project in Rioja Alavesa, founded by Koldo Eguren, the fifth generation of one of the region's best-known winemaking families. He's applying generations of accumulated knowledge to a different approach: single-vineyard selection from key Cru villages, prioritising grape quality and detailed, hands-on winemaking over volume. The structure follows the Bordeaux model, with UKAN as the top wine and Senderos as the second. We were introduced to UKAN through Jamie at fellow independent Old Chapel Cellars, who discovered the winery and first flagged it to us. We then invited UKAN's ambassador, Alejandro, over to show us the full range, and the partnership has grown from there, giving us the chance to bring you more of what UKAN does. Reserve Wines has a semi-direct, exclusive relationship with the winery, and this is the first white UKAN vintage we've had available in the UK.
Spanish white wines this ambitious don't come along often, and this one already carries a 94-point score from Tim Atkin, awarded before it even landed in the UK. Production is tiny: just 2,302 bottles, and this is the only shipment we've had so far. Buy one to lay down for a few years, or open it now and give it the air it needs to show what it's got.
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