Jamessuckling.com | JS 96
Published: Feb 3, 2022

Fresh and very floral with violets and berries. Blackberries and orange peel, too. Medium-to full-bodied with firm, linear tannins. Excellent length and structure. Seriously structured, Better after 2024, but already beautiful. 

The Wine Advocate | RP 95
Published: Dec 30, 2021

The 2018 Alion follows the path of the 2016: it is fresh and elegant and from a cooler (more Atlantic) vintage with more rain than the average and a relatively late harvest between September 28th and October 12th. They used 80% new barrels, with up to 10% made of American oak looking to (in their own words) give more sucrosity and sweetness to the wine, as it's a more vertical, tense and elegant expression of Ali?n. Part of the wine matured in concrete (something they started in 2016), and in 2021 they are experimenting with a 4,000-liter Rousseau foudre, as they want to keep working the texture and freshness. The wine is ripe at 15% alcohol and has a pH of 3.8 and a mellow 4.6 grams of acidity, round and soft. The wine matured until it was bottled in June 2020. The truth is that the wine comes through as subtle, elegant and balanced, with very integrated oak and a nice texture. It's one of the finest vintages for Alion. 257,257 bottles, 7,005 magnums and some larger formats produced. 
Drink Date: 2023 - 2032

Winemaker

Wine produced using the Tinto Fino variety. The grapes are harvest by hand in 12-kg boxes and are taken immediately to the winery to the sorting tables. Fermentation takes place in wooden tanks under controlled temperatures until a good polyphenolic structure is obtained which will provide the generous colour and firm structure that makes up part of the personality of this wine; and finally the ageing of between 14 and 20 months, depending on the characteristics of the vintage, is performed in full in new French oak Bordeaux barrels. These barrels, from the leading Bordeaux firms (Radoux, Taransaud, Saury and Vicard), are a significant investment in oak as, harvest after harvest, all the wine that is produced in Ali?n will be aged in new barrels that, after the wine is decanted to be bottle, will not be used again by the winery.

Once the wine is removed from the barrels, it will remain no less than 15 months in the stillness of the bottle, where it will end up assembling all the primary aromas of the fruit with the hues from its delicate ageing, resulting in an intense, complex and fleshy wine, but where the elegance is a distinguishing feature and hallmark of the winery.