Mano a Mano: Contino & Roda
Text & Photographs by Gerry Dawes copyright 2008
Two Rioja wineries, Viñedos del Contino, which has emerged as Spain’s most important “chateaux,” and Bodegas Roda, one of the most significant and innovative new bodegas built in Spain in the past 25 years, are near the top of almost everyone’s list of Spain’s greatest modern wines. Both Contino and Roda broke significant new ground when they were founded and though there are significant differences between their approaches to wine, they have both played an important role in the evolution of Rioja winemaking.
Located in La Rioja Alavesa, just a few miles northwest of the La Rioja’s capital, Logroño, Contino is a single vineyard pago that produces Contino Reserva and Gran Reserva, the prized Variedad Graciano and the stunning single parcel El Olivo, whose 2001 may be the best wine made in the modern history of La Rioja (perhaps all of Spain). Roda, a state-of-the-art winery with some old-fashioned touches, is located next to the centenarian bodegas of R. López de Heredia in Haro’s celebrated Barrio de la Estación. Roda makes the entry-level Roda (Roda II re-named), Roda I (the bodega’s flagship 100% tempranillo wine) and the super-luxury cuvee, Cirsion, all from 21 specially chosen single vineyard sites, mostly in La Rioja Alta and La Rioja Alavesa districts around Haro and one old vines Garnacha parcel (for the basic Roda only) in Tudelilla in La Rioja Baja. Both bodegas are making wines that major wine critics rate among the best in Spain and both have had received prestigious awards: Contino’s El Olivo 2001 was Verema.com’s Best Wine of the Year and Roda’s Cirsion 2000 and Cirsion 1999 were both given “Wine of the Year” awards from Spain’s Sibaritas magazine.Through a series of events that fall under the heading “Being in the right place at the right time”, I was able to taste complete verticals of both wines at the wineries over a span of two years, then follow up with a tasting of the latest releases from both wineries in a friendlymano a mano over a late lunch at Hector Oribe’s wonderful country restaurant in La Rioja.
The genesis of this article came at the Salón Internacional de Gourmets in Madrid in April of 2003, when Agustín Santolaya, the General Manager of Roda, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: “Come up to the winery in la Rioja on Thursday night after the Salón Internacional de Gourmets and I will taste every wine we have ever made since 1991 and I will prove to you how great the wines of Roda really are.”
Santolaya, a tall, handsome, affable man, who loves to gently, but firmly defend Roda’s prominently proclaimed scientific approach to viticultural and winemaking, knew that I had questioned his approach in print (see http://www.thewinenews.com/aprmay01/cover.html). And, at least in my first encounters with Roda (and other so-called alta expresión new wave offerings being fawned over as nuevos milagros, new miracle wines, by the international and Spanish press), I was not impressed. Nor was I impressed by the over-zealous public relations claim that Roda wines were the “new kings” of the Barrio de la Estación in Haro, the capital of the La Rioja alta winemaking district, especially since Roda’s neighbors in the barrio included a killer’s row of wineries that had always ranked near the top of Spain’s traditional bodegas: CVNE, La Rioja Alta, R. López de Heredia and Muga.
Founded in 1987, Roda, owned by a wealthy Barcelona businessman / wine importer (Pol Roger Champagne, Taylor’s Port, Château Mouton-Rothschild) Mario Rotllan and his wife, Carmen Daurella (thus, Ro-Da), put together a team led by Agustín Santolaya, who came on board as a consultant in 1992 and was promoted to Managing Director in 1998. He is alos the de facto Technical Director, the man who has the last word on winemaking at Roda. Santolaya and his team painstakingly identified and selected some 22 separate high-quality parcels from a grouping of about 100 such vineyard sites around the town of Haro in La Rioja Alta. Roda owns 150 hectares of vines and control another 150 hectares. The vineyards range in age from a minimum of 30 to more than 50 years old and are situated at altitudes ranging from 1475 to 1870 feet above sea level. Some, like the best vineyards in Burgundy and other great wine regions are at the limits of cultivation, which can be very problematic in tough years, but can produce sublime wines in the best years. Roda also has a 60-year old vines Garnacha vineyard at an altitude of 2100 feet in La Rioja Baja for use in Roda II (since 2002, now simply called “Roda.” There are a few parcels of young vines, but the grapes are sold off to other producers. Each year Santolaya selects grapes from the seventeen best lots of low yield vines that are a minimum of 30 years (average age 45 years) and vinifies them all separately in large upright wooden vats, then the Roda communal tasting panelBit is a communal palate hereBblind tastes from the wines to classify them. The winery produces a maximum of about 25,000 cases per year.From my tastings at the winery several years earlier, I felt that Roda had put too much emphasis on big, powerful, inky, concentrated wines that were laced with too much new oak and their superstar blockbuster alta expresión Cirsion offering was pegged at around $150 (now $225) on release. I was also skeptical of what I considered, from interviews and published reports, to be Santolaya’s bent for winemaking by the numbers, i.e. the reliance on scientific criteria for making good wines. Santolaya’s agro-scientist’s approach to extracting the best, “phenologically” ripe–quite ripe–tempranillo grapes from carefully researched old-vine vineyard sites, then making them into very concentrated, intense, low acid wines with liberal lashings of new oak, left me unconvinced. And I kept wondering whose “communal” palate was really behind the Roda wines, since they seemed somewhat formulaic, rather than inspired.
Nevertheless, I was not going to pass up an opportunity to taste one-on-one with the man responsible for the wines at the most highly publicized Rioja wineries of past thirty years, so I picked up a rental car in the late afternoon of the last day of the Salón Internacional de Gourmets and headed for la Rioja, a four-hour drive to the north. I passed through snow flurries on the way up and arrived at Roda’s impressive new-wave winery at 10:30 p.m. on a cold, windy night. Santolaya and I had the winery to ourselves. He had catered in some tapas and on a table in room upstairs, he had opened every wine Roda had ever made since its inception–21 wines in all, minus the 1991, which the winery decided not to sell after it had already been bottled and had Roda’s capsules in place. (Roda worked for eight years before releasing their first wine, from the poor 1992 vintage, in 1996. Their opening policy was to not release a wine until they thought they had it right.) This was going to be a long night, but as it turned out in more ways than one, a fruitful one.Since I had been there once before, Santolaya took me on a short tour of the winery, where all movements of wine are done by gravity, then we began to taste with the 1992 Roda II (the lesser of the three wines they make), followed by 1992 Roda I and 1993 Roda II (no Roda I was made that year), wines that still had some fresh acidity, but were from poor to mediocre vintages and were overwhelmed by new oak. Roda I, Santalaya said, is 100% tempranillo, while Roda II is usually 90% or more tempranillo, the rest garnacha and graciano. The 1994 Roda I (no Roda II made), from a great vintage was riper and smoother, but still marred by oak, as was the 1995 Roda II and 1996 Roda II. The wines begin to improve dramatically with the 1995 and 1996 Roda I, which, though they were still somewhat hamstrung by new oak, also showed exceptional promise smooth, ripe black fruits and minerals. Later in the tasting Santolaya would admit that after 1996, Roda began to try to tone down the new oak, all of which is French, from eight different barrel producers. Now they use 50% new oak for Roda I and Roda II (now just called Roda) and 100% new oak for Cirsion.
“In the earlier years, we used to put the wines in new oak for 24 months, but we have cut it to 12-14 months,” Santolaya said. The first month in new oak, when the wine is going through malolactic fermentation (in November in a special room warmed by radiant heat floors) gives as much wood to the wine as the next six - eight months does.”They didn’t succeed with the 1997 Roda I. It was a bad vintage and the thinner wine showed more oak than fruit (they sold off the Roda II in bulk), but in 1998, both Roda II and Roda I began to live up to the winery’s claims as top quality producer. The Roda II showed rich berry fruit and round, plummy, chocolatey, ripe flavors that carried the 13.9% alcohol well; the Roda I was a big, silky, but well-structured wine with loads of black plum and Graves-like minerals. Both vaulted over the 90 point bar. Because of the poor vintage, the 1999s were not succesful, but in 2000 Roda hit their stride with the house style: Big (14% alcohol), voluptuous, black wines with silky texture and lots of rich, ripe fruit. And in the stellar 2001 vintage, which some think produced the best tempranillo grapes in history, Roda realized the perfect embodiment of the house philosophy with big, sweet, silky, flavor-packed wines with distinct mineral terroir and an elegance, despite the hefty alcohol content. Both the 2001 Roda I and Roda II scored in the mid-90s.
It was now after midnight and I had tasted through 17 wines. Four wines remained to be tasted. All were Roda’s superstar $250 per bottle Cirsion (named for the thistle blossom that is the winery’s logo) and all weighed in at around 14.5% alcohol. Santolaya pointed out that Cirsion is not from a single vineyard, rather from grapes hand selected by a specially trained team of ten people, who look for the best bunches of tempranillo in the best years to make this wine. They taste the grapes and are looking for bunches in which, according to Santolaya, “Are already nearly wine inside the grape and bursting with ripeness, but are not overripe. We want a wine with the highest concentration of fruit and structure.”The must for Cirsion from these hand-selected 100 per cent tempranillo grapes undergoes alcoholic fermentation in upright Seguin Moreau oak foudres, then is put into new French oak barrels to undergo malolactic fermentation in a special room that has radiated heat floors. The winters are cold in La Rioja, so if something is not done to warm the wines, malolactic fermentation will not be completed until spring. Cirsion goes into new French oak for just about eight months, because they don’t want the wine to show too much oak. When Santolaya starts talking about Cirsion being the result of research into the polymerisation of tannins and anthocyans in grapes and how the judicious use of new oak is needed to fix the tannins and anthocyans (“make a sandwich with the wood,” he says) and “the grapes used to make Cirsion have long polymerized tannin strings, not the shorter ones that can make wines harsh and brittle,” I began to get that “this stuff is turning my brain to cornflakes” sensation.
We tasted the 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 Cirsions, all of which tipped the scales at 14.3% to 14.5% alcohol. They were big, exotic, very silky wines that showed rich, sweet black fruit, and were deceptively smooth, in spite of the alcohol levels. The 2001, of which only 7,000 bottles were made, was already on the market when this tasting took place (in 2003). It was in keeping with Roda’s philosophy that a wine should be ready to drink when it is released and should still live for 20 years. The jury is still out on Cirsion’s longevity, but the wine sure does get one’s attention.“Roda’s owner, Mario Rottlan, had a clear idea of what he wanted to do from the beginning. He didn’t want to do the same wine as the others,” Santolaya told me. “The great classic wineries were already doing great classic wines. The idea was to look for the maxim possible expression of the tempranillo grape in our areas of La Rioja. Finding the best grapes is fundamental, then we try to get every thing the grape has to give, but we try to make a wine that is elegant and not agressive. Our idea was to make wines that are fun to drink, that give pleasure with food.”
Somehow this idea is supposed to mesh with Agustín Santolaya’s thoughts on how to get your wine recognized by the critics in today’s wine world: “When you analyze the time a wine critic has to dedicate to judging you wine, if you divide that into the thousands of wines the critic has to taste every year, the number of hours he or she has to taste and write their notes, each wine gets about one minute. You don’t have two hours to convince a critic, just this first moment. You have to decide how you can get the most out of the time your wine is front of the critic, so you have to sock him in the jaw with your wine and deliver a knockout punch. You have to make him say, ‘Wow!’ ”Cirsion certainly does that, but I had spent more than three hours with Roda’s wines, not one minute per wine, and Santolaya had convinced me of the sincerity of Roda project. From the tastings, I could see that the wines have evolved steadily since those early wines of the 1990s that I had disliked so much. They were still more alcoholic and extracted than I like, but there is no denying the quality standards that go into these wines. I left hoping that over the coming years perhaps the people at Roda will amend one of items (#2) in their fourteen-point credo, “Our philosophy is perfection at all stages of winemaking.” Maybe they should substitute the word “excellence” for perfection, since, as many of us well understand, perfection in wine and in life is an unattainable goal, even if, like Roda, you are (#7) “supple tannins and elegance obsessed”.
Contino, established in 1973 by family members and investors from CVNE (pronounced Koo-nay, an anagram for Compañía Vínicola del Norte de España), became one of Spain’s first “chateaux” wineries in the modern era (Remelluri, founded in 1967, was the first such estate winery in the modern history of La Rioja). The first director and the driving force behind Contino was José Madrazo Real de Asua, also a director of CVNE, which was founded by his great grandfather in 1879. José is the father of Jésus Madrazo, the current winemaker.
The Contino property dates back to a 15th-century grant from Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand. It has has 153 acres of vineyards set on a gently sweeping slope that angles down to a natural boundary, the Ebro River, which nearly encircles the property in a broad loop. On other side of the Ebro, a high, curving, ochre-colored cliff is a vertical barrier that in effect forms the bowl that Contino occupies, creating a unique micro-climate. The sandstone cliff traps the heat and the ochre color reflects sunlight back into the alluvial rock-strewn property, parts of which are reminiscent of Châteaunuef-du-Pape, so Contino often gets riper grapes than many other vineyards in this area, and much riper than vineyards in the cooler, higher elevations around Haro.In off years, this warm bowl effect can be an advantage, but in very hot years this site-specific micro-climate is not without its own set of problems. During one of the early vintages at Contino, a hot spell caused the sugars to spike up before they could get the grapes picked to a level that produced wines which nudged 18% alcohol. No Contino was made that year; the wines had to be blended into some of CUNE’s entry level wines. Now, there is careful canopy management and a keen eye is trained on the vineyards during harvest, so that painful experience has not been repeated, but the unique factors at work in this vineyard produce wines with substantial concentration, so the wines usually weigh in between 13.5% - 14.2% alcohol.
“Contino es una finca calida (a warm micro-climate property),” Jésus Madrazo says.Over the past decade, Contino has begun the harvest between Sept 15 and 21, which makes us among the earliest grape harvesters in La Rioja. Historically, we get alcohol levels that range just under 14 per cent: The 1978 Contino is 13.8 per cent, the 1982 13.7 per cent, the 1985 14 per cent, etc. The trick is to achieve balance in the wines. If Contino didn’t have a classic enologist like me, the wines would probably rise to 15 per cent alcohol or more. If an enologist waits too long to harvest at Contino, he is in for a surprise.” (Madrazo’s mentor was the great Basilio Izquierdo, long-time enologist at CVNE, who after 33 years of making some of La Rioja’s best wines is no longer there–according to reliable sources a victim of the head-scratching shuffling of the deck going on at CVNE headquarters in Madrid.)
Despite their power, the wines of Contino, almost surely because of the palate of Jésus Madrazo, have grown increasingly more elegant–though still loaded with flavor–with each passing year under his tenure. Madrazo, unlike most modern winemakers in Spain, grew up drinking the great old library vintages of CUNE Imperial and Viña Real Gran Reservas (and from other classic bodegas) from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and developed a taste for great wine that has evolved with the wines he is making at Contino. With just a few vintages under his belt (he began in 1997 and made his first vintage in 1999), Madrazo made the stunning 2001 El Olivo, from 90% tempranillo harvested from a single parcel on which a 1,000-year old olive tree sits, and 10% graciano from a nearby Finca San Gregorio plot. El Olivo 2001 was named the Wine of the Year in Spain by Verema.com, a very popular Valencia-based wine website that draws a broad world-wide audience of both Spanish and English speakers. Many reports from the 2001 vintage called the tempranillo harvested that year as the best ever seen in the modern era in la Rioja. This 2,000-case gem is the greatest red wine this writer has tasted in the so-called modern era of Spanish winemaking, which roughly dates chronologically to around 1970. Stylistically, however, the modern Spanish wine era dates to the early 1990s, when concentration, high alcohol and loads of new French oak begin to dominate the popular flavor profile model.Though Madrazo quietly espouses the virtues of new oak, he approaches it with great caution and he is careful not to leave his wines in it too long. “You have to buy good oak that is not green and has been air-dried so that it is properly cured. Oak should not import any negative attributes to your wines. The oak must do justice to your own fruit, not what the same oak might do for someone else’s wine. For instance, I liked Marqués de Vargas’s 1998 & 1999 wines, which were aged in Russian oak made by a cooper in La Rioja. I admired the balsamic flavors and the toast, so I bought some to do an experiment. The Russian oak was a disaster at Contino with my fruit, the flavors I like to extract from tempranillo and my way of making wine.”
In fact, in the majority of the wines he makes, Madrazo uses a combination of French and American oak (with 1% Hungarian) with plenty of used oak in the mix. At Contino barrels are kept a maximum of 8 to 9 years, which means some parts of the parque de barricas, or barrel aging room, may have just over 10% new oak added each year, a practice that before the 1990s was perfectly normal. “I am not an enemy of new oak,” Madrazo says. Both Agustín Santolaya and I agree that when you use new oak, the quality of the fruit is paramount. You can’t use new oak on poor grapes. We use the highest quality bunches of grapes, which can stand up to new oak. Contino’s El Olivo and Graciano both have almost 100% new oak, but I don’t age them more than 12-14 months in it.”At an historic tasting at the Contino estate in early April 2005, Jésus Madrazo invited me to join many of the top wine writers in Spain and his mentor, Basilio Izquierdo, CVNE’s enologist since the 1970s, who made the wines of Contino from 1974 to 1998. (For the first few years until the vinification facility was built at the estate, Izquierdo made the Contino wines at CVNE in Haro). Madrazo planned to open almost every Contino crianza, reserva and gran reserva made since 1974, 28 wines in all. Missing would be six off years when no wine was released as Contino. At the end of the tasting Madrazo opened the stunning El Olivo 2001. The tasting did not include Contino’s rare Graciano.
Madrazo began with younger wines from 1994 on, ending the first phase of the tasting with 2004 Contino barrel sample. In the late 1980s, the winery at Contino, like many other wineries around the world, became infected with TCA and had to be sanitized at a cost of nearly $6,000,000. The Contino winery was closed for four years, although some wines were made at CVNE. No wine was released in 1992 and 1993. In 1994, Contino made a crianza wine and in 1995 returned to making reservas, the wine that Madrazo calls his “headache wine.”“Contino Reserva has to be good every year,” Madrazo said, “since it has the best price-to-quality ratio, it is our bread-and-butter volume wine (8,500 to 17,500 cases per year, depending on the vintage) and is the one that reaches more customers, it has to carry the quality image of Contino always.” Even in off years such as 1997, 2002 and 2003, these Contino Reservas scored consistently in the 88-89 point range (Basilio Izquierdo says that he has never seen “green tannins” in the wines from this estate). Since new oak had to be brought in after the TCA episode, the 1994 and 1995 wines, while still lively, fruity and spicey, had still not shaken off the taste of new wood.
In 1996, the year after Jésus Madrazo began working at Contino with Basilio Izquierdo, they made an excellent wine, one in which sweet, ripe blackberry and blueberry fruit, toast and carob were well integrated with still detectable, but not overly obtrusive new oak. The 1998 Contino Reserva was sweet, silky and elegant. In 1999, Jésus Madrazo took over the winemaking duties at Contino and was promptly rewarded, on his birthday in mid-April, with one of the worst ice storms in recent memory. As a result of the deep freeze a third of the normal crop was lost, but Madrazo increased the French oak content to 70 per cent (29 per cent American, 1 per cent Hungarian) and made a very elegant wine. In 2000 and 2001, the former vintage good, the latter great, the modern direction in which Madrazo intended to take Contino was clearly evident. Both wines had plenty of sweet, ripe red currant and blueberry fruit, spices and reasonably restrained oak. With just 13% alcohol, the 2000 Reserva was very elegant and stylish, the 2001 more powerful (13.7%) and packed with sweet fruit, chocolate and mineral terroir. Madrazo actually made a delicious, spicy, easy drinking wine in the poor 2002 vintage and seemed to do quite well with the super hot 2003, which was still aging in barrel.After a break, Madrazo and his crew poured wines from Contino’s “classic” period from 1974 up to 1988, when TCA began to be detectable. Since I have a great appreciation for traditional, well-aged wines, I scored them higher than my modern palate tuned Spanish counterparts, though Andres Proensa, probably Spain’s top wine writer, and I scored the 1978, 1981, and 1982 vintages almost exactly the same, in the high 80- to low 90-point range. Many of the wines showed classic sweet red cherry fruit with the hints of orange peel, dried rose and tea that come from aging. From 1983 to 1993, bad vintages and TCA took their toll with only the 1985 and 1986 still showing well.
Madrazo, as noted, has made some of the great modern wines of Spain with El Olivo and his 100% Graciano. As a throwback to the greatness of the traditional, long aging Rioja wines on which he cut his teeth, he also makes in very good to excellent years a Contino Gran Reserva, which he bottles only in magnums. Madrazo opened the Gran Reserva 1996, an incredible 96-97 point wine with deep, rich, deliciously sweet currant and cherry fruit, great balance and complexity. The 2000 Gran Reserva was nearly as good and the 2001 promises to be even better with time. Even the 1999 topped the 90 point barrier. “I wanted to make a wine that would recall the great classic Grandes Reservas that I grew up drinking (1964 CVNE Viña Real, R. López de Heredia Viña Bosconia 1942, etc.), wines that will live for 30 years or more. I want some wine lover in the future, who has had the good fortune to lay down these wines to be able to have the same experience that I had in savoring a great wine that is several decades old.”But Madrazo was not done. As if to leave the departing Spanish wine writers with a reminder that he was not only capable of making spectacular, high-90s, classical style wines, he brought out his masterpiece, the 2001 El Olivo (“my little creature”), which is reminiscent of Château Haut-Brion in a great vintage. Made with 90% selected tempranillo from the 15-acre olive tree parcel and 10% graciano, this intensely flavored, complex, beautifully structured wine finishes with a Graves-like, gravelly, mineral finish, the stamp of Contino’s terroir. It is a modern wine with a big difference: It is the dream wine of 40-year old winemaker whose palate incorporates the memory of the greatest Rioja wines of the past 60 years. This probably accounts for the fact that Madrazo’s Contino wines are lauded by wine critics who seem to fawn over ever new wine made, yet are also greatly appreciated by people who love all great classical-styled wines. El Olivo could well become the model for all modern wines in Spain.
The two historic tastings, at Roda in April, 2003 and at Contino in April, 2005 were supplemented by an earlier visit to Roda, a Roda tasting in San Sebastián at the Lo Mejor de Gastronómía culinary conference, and four or five other tasting encounters with Contino’s Jésus Madrazo at the winery, in Haro and in Madrid. The tasting at Hector Oribe Restaurant in Páganos in La Rioja Alavesa in January, brought me up to date on the latest releases and ratified what I already knew: Contino and Roda are two of the best bonafide superstar wineries of modern Spain. It is poetic justice that both are from La Rioja, a region that has taken heavy flack from a few Spanish wine writers who would have their readers think that just about any new wave wine from the hot-country Mediterranean wine regions is superior almost anything produced in Spain’s greatest time-honored climate red wine area. The wines of Contino and Roda are living proof that tempranillo grown in the unique micro-climates and soils of Rioja’s Atlantic influenced, mountainous wine region is still hard to top when put in the hands of talented winemakers like Jésus Madrazo and Agustín Santolaya.Tasting Bar
Notes on the latest releases of Roda and Contino, several of which were tasted at Hector Oribe restaurant in Páganos in La Rioja Alavesa on January 20, 2006 with Jésus Madrazo, Agustín Santolaya, and Gónzalo Lainez, Roda’s Export Manager and a key member of one of the important wine tasting groups in northern Spain, Peña Bilbao.Bodegas Roda
Roda II 2000 ($38)
Medium black plum. Nice balanced nose of fruit, minerals and oak. Very smooth and balanced with rich, black plum and chocolate flavors, nice edges. 89 pts.Roda I 2000 ($59)
Deep, but clean, clear blackberry. Nice fresh nice with, black plum and pleasant oak and minerals. Deep, plummy fruit and silky texture and mineral finish, this time shored up with noticeable tannins. Should be very good with a few years of cellaring. 91 pts.Roda II 2001($38; 17% garnacha)
Deep, clear black plum. Somewhat closed nose, but clean nose showing some lead pencil. Sweet, delicious, balanced mix of ripe fruit, minerals and oak. Excellent. 93 pts.Roda I 2001 ($59)
Deep blackberry color. A gorgeous, elegant, balanced black fruit nose. Delicious, seamless, silky, ripe fruit with chocolate and minerals in the finish. Very impressive. 95 pts.Cirsion 2001 ($250; only 7,000 bottles made)
Deep, dark black cherry, big glycerol tears. Deep, ripe black fruit nose. Very rich and exotic flavors with intense, deep, sweet blackberry fruit laced with chocolate and minerals. So silky it glides over the palate in a smooth, voluptuous rush of fruit, so that you may not notice the 14.3% alcohol until you have finished a glass of it. 96 pts.Cirsion 2000 ($250)
Deep black cherry, long slow tears. Exotic, spicey nose with violets and minerals. A very concentrated “Mediterrenean” Cirsion with delicious, silky black fruit flavors and enough tannins to hold it together. Very nice. 92 pts.Viñedos del Contino
Contino Reserva 2000 ($41.99)Medium-deep black raspberry. Integrated oak and sweet black fruit nose. Elegant, stylish and balanced with delicious, concentrated sweet red fruit, cocoa flavors and minerals with the oak noticeable, but in harmony. Grows with air. 93 pts.Contino Reserva 2001 ($41.99)
Deep blackberry. Pleasantly oaky nose with sweet, ripe fruit and toast. A tannic, oaky finish shores up lots of delicious sweet blueberry and red currant with chocolate and minerals. A great vintage that needs several years of cellaring. 94 pts.
Contino Gran Reserva 1996 ($64.99; magnums only)
Contino Gran Reserva 1999 ($64.99; magnums only; not yet in the market)
Deep dark black raspberry. Closed with whiffs of ripe fruit. Rich and sweet with cola, licorice and chocolate flavors, still bound up in firm tannins. Needs time. 91 pts.Contino Gran Reserva 2000 (magnums only, several years from release) Intense black and red fruit aromas with mineral and oak notes. Very rich, sweet, ripe, deep, delicious black raspberry fruit with carob, minerals and oak in the finish.
Contino Gran Reserva 2001 (magnums only, several years from release)Both wines need several years in bottle, but both promise to be delicious profound wines that show the best of the Contino estate, in fact the best that La Rioja can produce. I gave the 2001 a preliminary score of 96+. The 2000 is just a notch behind at 94-95 pts.
Contino Graciano 2000 ($94.99)
Contino Viña del Olivo 2000 ($119.99)
Contino Viña del Olivo 2001 ($119.99)
(published in Wine News)
About the author Gerry Dawes was awarded Spain's prestigious Premio Nacional de Gastronomía (National Gastronomy Prize) in 2003 for his work in calling attention to the quality of Spanish cuisines. In 2001, he was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award for Best Magazine Writing on Wine. Mr. Dawes writes and speaks frequently on Spanish wine and gastronomy in both the U.S and in Spain. He also leads customized gastronomy, wine and cultural tours to Spain. Mr. Dawes is currently working on a reality television series on wine, gastronomy, culture and travel in Spain, for which he will be the on-camera host (the first espisode was filmed in La Comunitat Valenciana).
Gerry Dawes can be reached at gerrydawes@aol.com Alternate e-mails (use only if your e-mail to AOL is rejected): gerrydawes@optonline.net or gerrydawes@hotmail.com
