Fernandez Alejandro Pesquera Tinto 2005

This traditional-style red is rich with plum, prune, coffee and meat notes and thick with ripe tannins. It's more muscular that graceful. Best after 2003.

If you loved the '89, you'll flip over the '90. If you've never tried Pesquera, you owe it to yourself to try Spain's finest wine of the region. Dark, opulent and bursting with jammy plum, meaty currant, smoky oak, vanilla and spice - this wine has it all. Beautifully balanced, even at this tender age, and sure to improve.

Bright and flavorful, with a solid core of black cherry and currant, shaded with a toasty, anise edge. A chewy wine, concentrated and almost jammy. Drinkable now, but best from 1995.

Aging gracefully, the '90 Pesquera has reached its summit, where it will rest for some time to come. The bouquet is complex and well developed with intriguing mocha, anise, sweet vanillin oak and ripe cherry aromatics that swirl in a pool of jammy black fruit. Flavors start out sweet and intense, but then reveal dry tannins in the mid-palate, balancing the wine with an amiable degree of power and structure. As the wine breathes and takes on life, the aromas and flavors revolve round and round on a carrousel of sensory delight. Like the circle, there is no end, it just goes on, and on, and on...

I tasted this wine in barrel at the winery with owner Alejandro Fernandez, and it so impressed me, I purchased 100 cases. This wine is made from Tempranillo grapes, and is filled with huge black fruit, vanillins, and a hint of spice, all built on a generous body and finishing with elegant tannins. Frank Prial says, "...at first it's Latour, then it transforms to Mouton-Rothschild, and finally one realizes it tastes like Pétrus." Open a bottle, wait two hours, and you'll understand why Alejandro Fernandez is considered one of the top ten winemakers in the world.

It is no secret that 1994 is one of the greatest vintages in the last 30 years for northern Spain. Pesquera's 1994 Tinto Crianza is undoubtedly representative of the fabulous ripeness and intensity the grapes achieved. From its opaque purple color, to its extraordinary aromatics, which consist of melted chocolate, roasted meats, jammy black fruits, and spice, this is an extraordinary, well-endowed, full-bodied wine of remarkable richness and intensity. There are impressive levels of glycerin and extract, but no hard edges or sense of heaviness in this blockbuster effort. Drink it now as wel as over the next 12-15 years.

A concentrated plummy fruit core, bursting with black cherries and spice, complemented with sweet oak nuances. Full-bodied and expansive on the palate, the wine has a lovely, soft acidity highlighting ripe, succulent fruit.