I attended a once-in-a-lifetime tasting of all the vintages of Vega Sicilia Único in magnum to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the purchase of the winery by the Álvarez family on the 15th of April 1982. They planned a number of events and even published a new book to commemorate the anniversary, and the one event for the international press, of which I was the only Spanish journalist because of my job at Robert Parker Wine Advocate, was scheduled for the 6th of September 2022.
They have even published a nice new book to celebrate their 40th anniversary as owners of Vega Sicilia.
Every year, I taste the whole portfolio of Tempos Vega Sicilia, the name of the Vega Sicilia group that also includes Alión in Ribera del Duero, Pintia in Toro and Benjamin de Rothschild & Vega Sicilia (a.k.a. Macan) in Rioja. (Their portfolio also includes Oremus in Tokaj, Hungary, but that is outside my regions; therefore, I don’t cover the Oremus wines.) Those notes and accompanying article are usually published in the month of January and include the wines that are going to be released during the year. As this time, my coverage of the Duero, where the majority of wines from the group and the mother company are, was scheduled for January, so I included all those notes in my general Duero article. I decided to save these notes on the magnums and write this article to be published at the same time as the Duero article.
Not only did we enjoy some of the most fabulous wines from Spain, we also had the superb food from El Celler de Can Roca.
Going back to the event, it was not a very formal tasting but more a day of enjoyment and celebration with colleagues from the international press, and food (from El Celler de Can Roca) was even served during part of the tasting. So, the notes on some wines can sometimes feel a little sketchy. But I definitely wanted to take the opportunity to give context to some of the greatest vintages ever (particularly 1970 and 1968), tasting all the wines side by side and giving an update on (nearly) 40 vintages of the most iconic wine from Spain. In the end, there were only 39 vintages bottled in magnum, including a preview of some still unreleased.
I’m 100 points on this!
I had planned a week of tastings in Priorat and Montsant when I received the email with the invitation. The event was in Girona, and I was already scheduled to be in Cataluña on those dates. It would take me a little more than 36 hours to travel there, participate in the busy schedule and return to my tasting routine. So, on the planned day, I jumped on a high-speed train in Camp de Tarragona and arrived in Girona for the welcome dinner and a preview of some vintages of Valbuena and a bunch of great Bordeaux to prepare us for an early start the next morning.
No room for a laptop!
The tasting had been designed to taste all the even-numbered vintages in the morning and the odd-numbered ones in the afternoon in flights of four or five wines, going from younger to older. We tasted in the dining room of El Celler de Can Roca, four people on my table; and with the clutter of glasses (we had one for each wine), the laptop was out of the question, and even more so in the afternoon, as that session also included lunch served at the same time as we tasted the wines. So, pen and paper it was, like in the old times…
The winery is already purchasing paintings for future magnums.
The labels of most of the magnums have an original painting that the winery bought, a little à la Mouton, but some of the older vintages just have a regular label instead of the artwork they bought. In any case, they have built a nice art collection that is continuously expanding and decorates the walls of the winery in Valbuena de Duero, which I also visited a few weeks after the special event to taste the current portfolio.
The Times, They Are A-Changin’
The good thing about a vertical tasting is the perspective it gives of the changes over time and, of course, the evolution of the wines. Three things were clear: the varietal mix changed and got simplified over the years, the alcoholic degree grew steadily over time, and the time the wines spent in barrel got progressively shortened. That’s something we already knew, but tasting all the vintages together gave me a very good picture of the evolution.
From the mid-1980s, the blend has been a majority of Tinto Fino (the local name for the strain of Tempranillo) with variable percentages of Cabernet Sauvignon, more recently usually below 10% but exceptionally reaching 25% in 1986, 20% in 1990 or getting as low as only 3% in 2008. In the 1980s, there was less Tinto Fino, around 60%, because more Cabernet was used and Merlot and Malbec were also part of the blend. Merlot and Malbec often went together as a small percentage, but occasionally Merlot was mentioned on its own, 15% in the 1982, for example.
In some vintages they mention the white Albillo too. In the decade of the sixties, the finest in history for me, they routinely used 30% to 40% other varieties along with the dominant Tinto Fino. These were, in descending order, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec and white Albillo. In fact, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Malbec were part of the appellation Ribera del Duero when it was created in 1982 because Vega Sicilia used them in their blend. At the tasting, we stopped at 1960, because that was the first vintage bottled in magnum.
The other two changes I mentioned were the alcohol levels going up from 13% to around 14.5%, especially from the turn of the century onward. That’s a global trend and we know it, due to climate change and also changes in viticulture and taste and the famous phenolic ripeness, etc. Had we tasted older wines, we would have seen even lower alcohol levels in the 1950s and 1940s…
The same, but this time decreasingly, can be said about the time wines spent in oak. In the old times, it was longer than nowadays, and I suspect more new oak has been used in recent years than in the past. I discussed all this quite extensively years ago with historic winemaker, Mariano García, who had been there from 1968 to 1997, as I was especially intrigued by the youth of the 1970. Things in the past, and not only at Vega Sicilia, were a lot less systematic and controlled. Times were different. Wines were sometimes bottled when they got sales, and if not, they were stored in whatever container was available. They did what they could, sometimes not even making detailed notes of what was done. That happened here, in Rioja and elsewhere. So, the wines sometimes stayed in oak for longer, intentionally or not.
Vega Sicilia is one of the few wineries with dedicated coopers that build all the American oak barrels they need. The French ones are purchased.
The custom in the 1960s and 1970s was that the wine would often spend a few years in large and quite old and neutral oak vats, which was like freezing time, as the development in those large containers was very slow. Also larger barrels were used, 576-liter hogsheads, and not only 225-liter barriques. And there must have always been some new oak, but the regime of renewing the barrels was surely not the same as it is today. Both French and American oak has always been used to this day. But today, the American oak barrels are exclusively crafted by their own coopers. They build a number of new barrels every year with the oak they purchase and age on site at the winery, which is a large estate with quite a lot of space. The French oak barrels and vats are purchased from cooperages.
The Decades
Talking about the 1960s, there’s always been a legend about the even vintages from that decade being better than the odd ones. At such an old age, the saying goes, “There are no great wines, only great bottles.” There’s always some bottle variation, because of the bottling practices of the old times and the storage conditions of the bottles plus the inevitable variation from cork to cork (and in very old wines even bottle to bottle!). But yes, the finest flight of the tasting was that of the 1970, 1968, 1962 and 1960, even after some big issues with the 1968. It was perhaps because of this legend of the even and odd vintages that the tasting was arranged like it was.
The arrangement was good, because we were fresh in the morning to work through the flights of even-numbered vintages, starting with the youngest, so they wouldn’t overpower the older ones. I sometimes prefer to start with the older and more delicate wines in a tasting, and for sure during the course of a lunch or dinner, to avoid arriving too tired to the older and more nuanced wines that require more attention. But there’s no such thing as the perfect ordering in a tasting, and this was as good as any other, because tasting (almost) 40 (great) wines in just a few hours is a brutal exercise … but someone has to do it!
We started at 9:30, and there was an appetizer planned for noon, which meant pouring and tasting 22 wines in a couple of hours. I’m a slow taster, so I struggled a bit and would have liked to have had more time with the old wines in the glass to follow their evolution. The old wines were poured later, so they were in the glass for even less time.
The afternoon session started at 13:00, and a nine-course (delicious) menu was served at the same time as the four flights of odd-numbered vintages were poured and tasted. It was sometimes impossible trying to eat, taste and take notes at the same time in a small space, and some of us had quite a laugh about it.
The 1981 was a great surprise, one of the finest vintages of the tasting.
Statistics don’t lie: there were only 17 odd-numbered vintages and 22 even-numbered ones. So, the legend is true (to a point): there are more great vintages in even-numbered years than in odd-numbered ones. But there are also some exceptions, like the wonderful 1981, which is better than the more famous 1982, or the surprising and unexpected 2013, which is from a very challenging year.
Can we make any further conclusions? Well, the quality is a lot more homogeneous nowadays; there’s a lot more knowledge and control, and the effect of the vintage and the weather is less evident in the wines in modern times. There are more vintages in the last decades than ever (only 2001 was not bottled in the last 15 years), as the average before is around seven vintages per decade. Statistically, the 1970s had the lowest average score (counting 1970 as the last vintage of the decade of the sixties…) and the 1960s the highest, but there were always ups and downs. Remember, we’re talking about an agricultural product, dependent on weather and many other variables. In the end, you have to look into each individual wine … as always!
The one thing that is certain is that the Álvarez family has grown the brand, the prestige and the business tremendously to make Vega Sicilia Único the most renowned Spanish wine in the world. Cheers for another 40 years … or more!
Luis Gutiérrez comes from an IT background with over two decades of experience working for a large multinational company in Madrid, sharing his free time between his family and wine. He lives in the Spanish capital with his family.
He's a founding member of elmundovino.com, the dean and most prestigious wine website published in Spanish, where he has written and tasted since its creation in the year 2000. He also writes for other publications belonging to the El Mundo newspaper in Spain as well as contributing to different wine and gastronomy publications in Spain, Portugal, Puerto Rico and the UK. Awarded the title Cavaleiro da Confraria do Vinho do Porto in 2004, Port and Douro are some of his favorite regions and wines, as he writes about what is happening in the wine world in Spain and Portugal, with occasional articles on Burgundy, Rhône, German Riesling, Champagne or other classic regions in Europe. He writes locally about foreign wines, and abroad mainly about Spanish wines.
Luis contributed to most of the Spanish entries for the 2008 book 1001 Wines You Must Try Before You Die 9 (in some countries, 1001 Wines You Must Taste Before you Die). He is also one of the co-authors of The Finest Wines of Rioja and Northwest Spain published in 2011 in the UK and US and in 2012 in Japan, which won the 2011 André Simon Special Commendation Award in London.
He's been the Spanish specialist correspondent for Jancisrobinson.com since May 2011 and received the Spanish National Gastronomy Award for journalism in November 2012 from the Spanish Minister for Tourism.
More than anything, he enjoys learning about wine, the wine people, and places, traveling, tasting, reading, writing, eating, and drinking and especially sharing great food and great bottles with friends whenever there's a good excuse for it!
Luis joined The Wine Advocate in 2013 as the reviewer for the wines from Spain, Argentina and Chile, and in late 2015, he took charge of reviewing wines from the tiny Jura in France.
His first major book, Los Nuevos Viñadores, covering all the major regions from Spain, its vineyards, landscapes and gastronomy, was published in Spain in the first half of 2017 by Planeta, the largest Spanish-language publisher in the world. Later that year, the book was launched in English under the name The New Vignerons, and in 2023, it was translated to Mandarin and launched in China. The book has sold more than 15,000 copies worldwide.
In 2022, he contributed to the book Calicata, Gredos como Terroir, a collective work with people like Josep Roca, Pedro Parra and Dani Landi.
In 2024, Luis expanded his coverage to include reviewing the wines from Portugal, a country that is close to his heart, while giving up his responsibilities over Argentina and Chile.
