Tempos Vega Sicilia Valbuena 5 2018
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From The Winemaker
The Valbuena 5º from Vega Sicilia is a pure expression of red wine. With a meticulous process of aging between barrel and bottle for five years, the wine is given its name. This particular vintage has a fresher, Atlantic influence with a slightly higher productivity. The selection process was stricter, resulting in the wines having a touch of lively freshness and verticality. In the 2018 vintage, we were able to extract more from the grapes and use a higher percentage of American oak during the first year of aging. As the wine matured in the vat for a second year, its complexity of nuances and elegant texture were perfectly refined.
Score
96 Points, James Suckling.
96 Points Wine Advocate
"The 2018 Valbuena comes from a cooler vintage with good yields that required sorting and selecting in search of a happy and vertical version of Valbuena, pushing a little more and giving the wine a little more oak, especially American (5%). It was produced with 96% Tinto Fino and 4% Merlot that went through a three- to four-day cold soak and fermented with indigenous yeasts followed by malolactic in stainless steel. The élevage was in new and used 225-liter oak barrels and 21,000-liter oak vats. It has 14.5% alcohol and a pH of 3.8 and 4.78 grams of acidity (tartaric), so it's ripe and with mellow acidity that gives it a mellow mouthfeel. This is a very spicy vintage for Valbuena, getting closer to the style of Único (while at the same time I felt the 2018 Pintia from Toro was getting closer to the aromatics of some vintages of Valbuena, like 2010). It was a late-ripening year with a tendency toward freshness in the wines. The palate is medium to full-bodied, with very fine tannins that made the wine nicely textured and very elegant. There is a lot of regularity in the Valbuena of the last few years, here with more tension and freshness of the 2017, a little more balsamic even. 180,580 bottles, 5,528 magnums and some larger formats produced. It was bottled in May 2021."
