Long-time readers of our Daily Discoveries might recall a brief period when we were able to feature the distinct pleasures of library wines from Bodegas Magaña. Well that tap ran dry three to four years ago, until just now! If you don’t recall or are a new subscriber here’s a refresher: Back in 1970, Juan Magaña acquired Merlot cuttings from the very nursery that supplies Pomerol’s Château Pétrus—undoubtedly among the world’s greatest wines. Today bottles of Pétrus can fetch anywhere between $2,500 to $7,000, and even that’s not a hard ceiling, which makes the sub $70 price tag of Juan’s 1999 Reserva downright shocking. Of course, without perfect provenance, this dark, savory, and deeply seductive red would be a shadow of its former self but, thankfully, we don’t have to worry about that–this vintage ‘99 is absolutely firing on all cylinders right now and I urge you to blind your fellow friends on it, especially those with ultra-expensive Bordeaux leanings. We have very precious few cases, don’t miss this one.

Bodegas Magaña is a winery with a long and distinguished history, so it’s a little surprising that there are still bottles of direct-from-the-winery 1999 to be had (though very few of them are left!). It’s a testament to the Spanish penchant for cellaring wines for extended periods, and Viña Magaña’s impressive size: Their vineyard holdings total about 120 hectares in Navarra, a DO which sits to the east of Rioja, along the Ebro River in the shadow of the Pyrenees. The soils are a mix of clay, limestone, and river-borne silt, sand, and gravel (similar to Bordeaux), with a climate that mixes mountain and Mediterranean influences—the physical area covered by the DO is quite vast, so there are a number of subzones with unique microclimates, with those closer to the Pyrenees obviously skewing more “continental.”

While their vineyard holdings are wide-ranging, the Magaña bodega is headquartered in the town of Barillas, near the southern tip of the Navarra DO in the ‘Ribera Baja’ subzone. As with Rioja, which borders it to the west, Navarra’s wine history has long been intertwined with that of Bordeaux. Educational pilgrimages to Bordeaux were commonplace among Rioja/Navarra winemakers in the 18th and 19th centuries—not only was Bordeaux just 150 miles away, but it was also the most prestigious wine zone in the world, and perhaps the biggest takeaway for Spanish winemakers in that period was the use of oak barrels for aging. Later on, when the phylloxera louse decimated Bordeaux’s vineyards, the Bordelais looked to Rioja and Navarra for grapes and wine to keep them going while they replanted their vineyards.

So, as is noted prominently in any discussion of Viña Magaña, the Merlot used in today’s wine comes from vine material originally obtained from the same nursery that supplied Château Pétrus in Pomerol. It comprises up to 65% of the blend, with Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Malbec, and Tempranillo making up the rest. The wine spent 12 months aging in French and American oak barriques followed by many years in bottle before multiple releases. Today’s mature parcel was among the most recent releases from Viña Magaña’s cellar.

The perfect provenance of this ’99 is on full display in the glass, in the form of a surprisingly youthful, nearly opaque ruby-black color with slight hints of brick at the rim. At 25 years old, it is now in its absolute sweet spot now. Decant this wine (watching for sediment) for 20 minutes before serving at 60-65 degrees in Bordeaux stems, and you’ll be greeted with a rush of dried black and red plum, cassis, black cherry, pipe tobacco, cedar, grilled herbs, roasted meat, turned earth, and vintage leather. Medium-plus in body and showing off some mature ‘secondary’ aromas, it still has a trace of dusty, fine-grained tannin lending texture and lots of freshness keeping the wine in pitch-perfect balance. It is a rare treat to get to pop and pour a mature wine of this level at this price, and were you to serve it to knowledgeable guests, I can’t see them guessing anything but serious Right Bank Bordeaux here—there just aren’t many classic reference points for a wine like this. Enjoy!