La Bastida de Alava

Yjar, Rioja, 2020

Name: Yjar, Rioja
Brand: La Bastida de Alava
Price: 306 GBP

96/100

Inside Bordeaux

Available Vintages

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En primeur

2020
3x75cl
EP
£306.00
2020
3x75cl
EP
£306.00

Justerini & Brooks Tasting note

Yjar is a centuries old estate located in the foothills of the Sierra de Toloño. Home to some of the oldest and most spectacular vineyards in Rioja Alavesa. The winery itself fell into disrepair and disuse following a fire in 1835 and has only been re-cultivated and rejuvenated in the past decade. The 3.8ha (9,39 acres), high-altitude vineyard is co-planted with a massale selections of Tempranillo, Graciano, Garnacha, Granegro and Rojal. The wine spends 30 months in barrels and foudres of different sizes before bottle ageing. First released just three years ago, Yjar is already established as a cult label. 2020 was a cooler year than 2019 which gives this wine a steely mineral intensity. It is laser focused and red fruited with cherry, plum, black and red currants, wild herbs and a hint of oak spice.

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GUARANTEED PROVENANCE

Provenance in fine wine

When it comes to purchasing wine, provenance is of upmost importance. A wine’s history – where it’s sourced from and how it’s been stored – can have an enormous influence on the eventual enjoyment it provides. At Justerini & Brooks, we can trace nearly every case back to the domaine, estate or Château it originally came from; we ship from over 200 wine producers throughout the world.

Wines not bought directly from the vineyard are either sourced from trusted suppliers, with whom we share the same philosophy and rigour in buying, or from our own network of Cellarers customers. These customers’ wines are stored in optimal conditions in Octavian Corsham and, in the vast majority of cases, have been stored by us since the wine was first shipped. We do not purchase wine from auctions.

We feel it is equally important to for our customers that the case they buy and leave in storage with us is exactly the same case they subsequently have delivered. This may sound obvious and straightforward, yet we are one of very few merchants to have taken measures to ensure this.

We have created a system where every case is independent, thereby ensuring a trail of ownership and peace of mind for every customer.

The Journey

Justerinis ensures that every case of wine stored with Cellarers (Wines) Ltd has a unique identifier and customer’s name, almost unheard of in the industry as it is expensive to administer. These details are printed and placed on every case which is logged and recorded under your account name and kept in the world’s most renowned storage facility, Octavian Corsham.

This information is sent from our systems to the warehouse every day to ensure the trail of ownership is verified and upheld.

While customer reserves are stored in Corsham, our physical stocks are kept in Hoddesdon, further providing a geographical separation between customers’ wines with Cellarers and Justerinis’ own stock.

Further Reassurance

Cellarers (Wines) Ltd is a legally separate limited company from Justerini & Brooks which currently holds approximately £450 million worth of customer reserves. It is fully insured to catastrophic loss. Many merchants will state that wine in their care is fully insured, but in reality this is on an individual case basis with insufficient cover for total loss as this is prohibitively expensive. The cover provided by Octavian and Justerini & Brooks is unmatched.

Cellarers (Wines) Ltd is audited by PwC every year.

Critic Reviews

96/100

Jane Anson,

Inside Bordeaux

Focused crystalline raspberry and cranberry fruit character, savoury, plenty of white pepper and fennel spice, intense, powerful, balanced, nuanced and gripping with a drawn out finish, providing more evidence of this compelling wine. 3.8ha of grapes, field blend. Native yeast fermentation, small size open top wooden vats, goblet trained high altitude vineyard, co-planted with massal selection. Foothills of Sierra de Tolono, 600-800m altitude. A challenging vintage that saw early rain and hail followed by a hot and dry summer, required intuition and rapid response - the kind of growing season that great winemakers rise to meet, as Telmo Rodriguez and Pablo Eguzkiza have done here. Harvest September 30 to October 7.

drinking window 2025 - 2042

date of review 08/2024

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abv:

14.5%

allergen information

This product may contain sulphites. Full allergen information is available upon request, please call our Customer Relations Team on +44 (0)20 7484 6430.