The 2017 Rioja Imperial “Reserva” from Cuné is a lovely wine in the making, but it is still a handful years away from drinking with true generosity. I last tasted this wine a couple of years ago, when it was still quite youthful, and it is moving along nicely over that time towards a fine plateau of maturity, but it is still a young wine to my palate. The beautiful bouquet offers up scents of black cherries, black raspberries, cigar wrapper, a lovely base of soil, Rioja spices and a lovely mix of French and American oak. On the palate the wine is focused, complex and full, with superb depth of fruit at the core, lovely soil reflection, ripe, fine-grained tannins and a very long, pure and complex finish. As 2017 was a frost-shortened vintage in Rioja, this wine has more overt structure out of the blocks than many recent vintages, so that even at six years of age, it deserves a bit more cellaring time to properly soften up its tannins. It will be an outstanding Imperial Reserva once it fully blossoms.