This is a warning that I did not try this wine, and I don’t want anyone to get their skivvies bunched up.  In almost five years of writing about wines, I have only written about the wines that I have either drank or tasted, there is a slight codicil to that, as I have included wines that have been highly touted to me by a couple of my cast of characters that are paraded on these pages periodically.  I think that I should only write about what I know or have tried, that is why these articles have run the gamut from jug wines to First Growths that I have had the good fortune to encounter.  That being said, I do get a multitude of emails from assorted senders about wines, and I am sure that you won’t find that too strange, considering that I enjoy wines as a hobby.

This wine has kind of haunted me ever since I read about it from Elie Fine Wine in Birmingham, Michigan.  I also borrowed the photo from Elie Fine Wine as it is not in my cellar.  It has just sat kind of tucked away in a back room of my brain, that has been locked, padlocked, wrapped in barbed-wire and guarded by sentries and dogs.  It is the kind of wine that one could get divorced over, after being run over by the car a couple of times.  We are planning on retirement and this would just not fly as an ideal purchase and let’s face it, I have never been known as a cheap date.  I never discuss a rating for a wine, because I think it is an arbitrary number and I am always leery of anyone making a decision for me, but when you read about a white Rioja wine that is over thirty years of age that achieves a perfect 100, even I had to pay attention.

Marqués de Murrieta Castillo Ygay Blanco Gran Reserva Especial 1986 captured my fancy and my curiosity.  I have had red Rioja wines from Marqués de Murrieta in the past, but nothing of this grade and fame.  The grapes were planted in 1945 in the highest elevation of their Finca Ygay in the Rioja Alta.  The wine is almost entirely made from Viura with three percent Malvasia.  The wine was initially aged for two-hundred-fifty-two months in American Oak, and if that was not long enough it then spent an additional sixty-seven months in concrete.  This was not a quick bulk production job, in fact there was a little more than eighty-one hundred bottles produced.  I mean this is a story for a Raconteur, unfortunately, not this Raconteur.  My Bride will be pleased with my restraint.