Winemaker Notes
Viñas del Lentisco – Villota is owned, operated, and founded by Carmen Pérez-Garrigues and her father Ricardo Pérez- Villota, the fourth and third generations of the Pérez-Villota family, a line of growers that have been rooted to the San Rafael estate in Laserna, Laguardia on a meander of the Ebro River since 1930. In 1973, the Villota family cofounded Viñedos del Contino, Rioja's first single estate winery with CVNE. The partnernship lasted until 2013, when the Villota family broke off, taking the historic family estate with them, and founded their own winery under the Villota brand on this historic plot of land.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2022 Selvanevada Tinto is terrific, with a ripe, medium to full-bodied, concentrated style revealing a darker core of fruits, some leafy herbs, graphite, and spicy notes, solid mid-palate depth, and ripe, building tannins. A serious wine, it will evolve for a decade.
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James Suckling
Fruity nose but not yet a fruit bomb. I like the purity and the fleshy cherry core, with notes of blueberries, dark plums and dried hibiscus. Fresh and nicely chewy with a fleshy core of mid-palate fruit. Flavorful, medium-length finish with loads of fruit.
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Vinous
The 2022 Tinto Selvanevada is 75% Tempranillo, 19% Graciano, 3% Garnacha and 3% Mazuelo from the Ebro riverbank vineyard in Laserna, Laguardia, Rioja Alavesa. Aged for seven months in oak barrels, this garnet red wine features blackberry and elder along with wild herbs and a liqueur-like touch. Dry and grippy on the palate, it is intense with reactive tannins, lingering long on its fruit notes. This is a rich wine to hold for a couple of years.
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Wine Spectator
This fluid red offers a pleasingly plump core of chopped black plum and raspberry flavors reined in by a sinewy frame of fine-grained tannins. Fragrant hints of lavender, rooibos tea leaf, vanilla and dusty spices lace the fruit profile and linger on the finish. Tempranillo, Graciano, Mazuelo and Garnacha.
Hailed as the star red variety in Spain’s most celebrated wine region, Tempranillo from Rioja, or simply labeled, “Rioja,” produces elegant wines with complex notes of red and black fruit, crushed rock, leather, toast and tobacco, whose best examples are fully capable of decades of improvement in the cellar.
Rioja wines are typically a blend of fruit from its three sub-regions: Rioja Alta, Rioja Alavesa and Rioja Oriental, although specific sub-region (zonas), village (municipios) and vineyard (viñedo singular) wines can now be labeled. Rioja Alta and Alavesa, at the highest elevations, are considered to be the source of the brightest, most elegant fruit, while grapes from the warmer and drier, Rioja Oriental, produce wines with deep color, great body and richness.