Winemaker Notes
Blend: 94% Tempranillo, 3% Graciano and 3% Mazuelo
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2011 Contador is a compact, tight-knit wine, serious and backward that needs plenty of air. It's still a baby showing the typical aromas that only the very best barrels can give and that you only find in a very few top wines (and I'm thinking of Pingus here). However, the personality is quite different, akin to a young Nuits-St-Georges, with very fine tannins and subtle acidity. I feel the wine needs a couple of years in the bottle. Drink 2016-2022.
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.