You Know 904, Ygay and Prado Enea.
Now Meet the 98-Point Secret.

Dear Artisans,

If your cellar has Legendary Gran Reservas such as La Rioja Alta 904, Marques de Murrieta Castillo Ygay, or Muga Prado Enea in it, stop what your doing right now.

Back up up the truck. Quickly.

Those are the benchmarks, and they have earned it. But there is a fourth name that shares that shelf at half the price that most don't know about.

At our Spanish masterclass last month, it finished in the top three sellers of the night. James Suckling gave it 98 points.

Contino was founded in 1973 as the first single-estate chateau in Rioja, a joint venture between the historic CVNE house and the family that owns the land. In a region built almost entirely on blending fruit bought from across three sub-zones, that was close to heresy.

The estate is 62 hectares inside a meander of the Ebro River at Laserna, in Rioja Alavesa. Every grape in this bottle comes from those rows. It is the Bordeaux model transplanted to Spain: one property, one boundary, one wine that can only taste like this piece of ground. The name comes from el contino, the 16th-century royal guardsman who kept continuous watch over the Catholic Monarchs.

These are my own photographs, taken walking the estate on September 9th, 2024, right at harvest.

You can see what makes it a single vineyard rather than an appellation: the gnarled old bush vines, the stony soil near the river that slows ripening and holds humidity, the great oak standing at the end of a row, and a long table set beneath it. Every bottle of this wine was grown between those boundaries.

The Gran Reserva takes only the best micro-plots on the estate, at Finca San Rafael. It ferments in concrete with the malolactic in the same vats, then goes twenty-four months in French oak, about a quarter of it new. Only 2,500 cases were made.

Contino did in 1973 what nobody else in Rioja was doing: drew a line around 62 hectares in a bend of the Ebro and made the wine only from inside it. Fifty years later the critics have caught up, and the 2018 Gran Reserva is the highest-scoring wine the estate has released.

It is drinking beautifully tonight and will keep evolving through 2040. The Reserva beside it is down to two bottles.

Salud,

— James Tran