Winemaker Notes
The 2016 Contino Reserva is a wine of excellent quality, balanced and with a fragrant nose that suggests perfectly ripe and healthy red fruits as well as floral and balsamic notes, that bring freshness and harmony from the subtle spicy hints. The palate reveals ripe tannins and fruit, and a long silky finish, revealing the real and personal character that defines Contino, elegance and balance.
Vegan Friendly
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is so powerful and tightly wound with so much intensity and power. Full body. Crushed berries and hints of walnuts and cedar. Purity in fruit. Very subtle character, but great tension and richness.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The renewed classical red 2016 Reserva was produced as a blend of 85% Tempranillo, 10% Graciano and 5% Mazuelo. It fermented in small stainless steel and concrete vats and matured in 225-liter French (80%) and American (20%) oak barrels for 18 months. It has a very expressive nose, open, aromatic and showy, a little Rhône-ish. 2016 was a cooler year and they had a long harvest, and it seems like the fruit ripened thoroughly without excess. It's a natural continuation of the 2015, when the wine already had more freshness and better integrated oak. It has a full body and some dusty tannins, finishing dry and tasty. It's ready to drink.
Rating: 94+ -
Wine Enthusiast
Fully ripe blackberry, cassis and prune aromas are a touch brandied and heady, indicating that this Reserva from a high-quality year needs a bit more time. A plump palate is both fleshy and flashy, with good depth. Plum, raspberry, currant and chocolaty oak flavors finish full and a touch creamy.
Cellar Selection -
Wine & Spirits
CVNE’s estate in Laguardia, Rioja Alavesa, covers 153 acres above the Ebro River. The clarity and ease of this Reserva reflect what is possible when Rioja is grown and made at the same place, the place happens to be prime and the team carefully selects the fruit. Given a cold soak with its skins and fermented spontaneously, the wine sustains fresh notes of violets, red currants and cherries, the tannins adding an herbal edge. Lively and bright, the wine left Berkshire chef Amy Loveless wanting the chewy crust of a wood-oven pizza topped with duck sausage.
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Wine Spectator
This broad red shows inviting freshness, with black cherry and red plum notes that are pure and engaging. Accents of herb, graphite and black tea weave along through the smooth, toasty finish. Drink now through 2030.
Contino, the first Rioja château 1973, impelled by CVNE and the owners of the 62-hectare property located in the Rioja Alavesa. The history of the property dates from the 16th century, and is reflected in its name. The “contino” was the officer in charge of a guard corps of a hundred soldiers who protected the royal family "de contino” (continuously) from the times of the Catholic Monarchs onwards. According to the tradition, Saint Gregory, the patron saint of vineyards, passed through the lands of this same Rioja property, giving rise to the use of his figure in the logo of this winery, and to the use of his name for some of the plots now planted with vines. The wine produced on this property, fruity and elegant, is heir to the best Rioja tradition. It is made with an individualised grape harvesting system in which only grapes from the same vineyards that surround the old manor house are used. Their origin in the various plots is noted. The perfect combination of soils, Atlantic-Mediterranean climate and refined technique have made Contino, more than 30 years after the first vintage, a reference product both in and outside Spain. The 62 hectares of Laserna vineyards in Laguardia are protected by the hill called the Cerro de la Mesa, which gives this land a characteristic orientation and mesoclimate. The hand-cut grapes are transported along a short road to the outbuildings so as to avoid damaging their qualities.
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.