Winemaker Notes
La Cueva del Contador 2008 is bright and an intense blackberryred in color. The nose is deep with red fruit and black fruit notes. Mineral, smooth with well-integrated oak. On the palate it is both fresh and mature at the same time. It is well structured with an excellent balance between sweetness, acidity and tannin. Tasty and elegant with a powerful finish.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2008 La Cueva de Contador is 100% Tempranillo aged for 18 months in new French oak. This purple-colored Rioja offers up a striking nose of sandalwood, Asian spices, incense, lilacs, espresso, and blackberry. Savory, ripe, sweetly-fruited, and incipiently complex, it will evolve for 6-8 years and drink well through 2028, if not longer. However, it lacks the depth of great vintages such as 2001, 2004, and 2005.
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.