The opaque purple 2005 El Vinculo Reserva spent 24 months in barrel. It is a more backward wine giving up aromas of smoke, Asian spices, licorice, tapenade, and blackberry. This lengthy effort will be at its best from 2013 to 2020+. Bodegas Alejandro Fernandez keeps rolling along turning out a surprisingly large amount of wine from Ribera del Duero, all of it produced from Tempranillo, while maintaining a high level of quality. In 1999 Alejandro Fernandez discovered a parcel of old, head-pruned Tempranillo in the historic windmill village of Campo de Criptana in La Mancha. Not generally considered a source of high quality grapes because of extreme summer heat, Fernandez has demonstrated that careful farming can overcome serious obstacles. The grapes for these two wines were harvested in the first two weeks of August, as hard as that is to believe once you have tasted the results.Importer: Steve Metzler, Classical Wines From Spain, Seattle, WA; Tel. (206) 297-6713