Winemaker Notes
Blend: 100% Old Vine Tempranillo
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
What Romeo has achieved in the challenging 2002 vintage is impressive. The very limited production 2002 Contador (100% old vine Tempranillo) reveals great purity and texture as well as that nobility and stature found in all of the world’s most profound wines. I’ll keep my tasting notes short as there are fewer than twenty cases for the USA market. It possesses fabulous richness, full body, sweet tannin, and 10-16 years of longevity. It can be drunk now or cellared. The prices for these wonderful curiosities reflect their rarity as well as the high quality winemaking.
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.