To qualify as a Gran Reserva, a wine must remain in oak for two or more years, and then in bottle for three or more. (In comparison, Reservas age one year or more in oak, followed by two or more in bottle.)

Marqués de Murrieta’s Gran Reserva is made in select vintages with hand-harvested fruit sourced from their Ygay Estate, 320 to 485 metres above sea level.  Fruit is de-stemmed, then fermented in cool stainless steel. Juice is pressed off in a vertical press, a gentle process that extracts colour and ripe tannins. The wine ages for just over two years in American oak, followed by three years in bottle prior to release.

“They don’t produce every wine every year (they skipped this wine in challenging 2017), so the 2018 Gran Reserva follows the 2016. In 2018, a cooler year, they produced it with a selection of the best wines from the year, and the breakdown is 87% Tempranillo, 8% Graciano and 5% Mazuelo (Cariñena) picked between the first and 20th of October, late in a slow-ripening year. It fermented in stainless steel but aged separately by variety in American oak barrels, 25 months this year, blended and kept in concrete until bottling. It’s a modern rendition of the old classical Gran Reserva, clean, complex, aromatic, expressive and open, with the logical development time brings, with great balance and freshness in this cooler year. It comes in at 14.2% alcohol with a pH of 3.65. This will be the last vintage of this wine as such, from 2019 onward it will be replaced by another concept of Gran Reserva from one single vineyard that is planted exclusively with Tempranillo and Graciano in the Valsalado lieu-dit. 13,786 bottles and 600 magnums were produced. It was bottled in May 2021.”
95 points, Luis Gutierrez, Wine Advocate (Robert Parker), February 2025