‘You can’t spit this,’ Benjamín Romeo told me when I tasted it from barrel. It wasn’t the finished blend, but after a gap in production in 2013, Contador is back with a swagger. Rosemary, violets and dense plum and blackberry fruit, ripe tannins and a fresh flourish. This is a big wine, but it doesn’t lack subtlety. Drinking Window 2019 - 2030.

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.Simple bright raspberry and blackcurrant fruits with a violet-like floral edge. The palate has a neat, fine and crunchy feel. Juicy tannins. Nice and fresh. Drink now.

Vivid purple. Heady, exotically perfumed bouquet of intense black and blue fruits, incense, vanilla and Indian spices, along with suggestions of smoky minerals, mocha and cola. Sweet, palate-staining blackberry, blueberry, cherry-vanilla and violet flavors show unlikely vivacity for their heft and power, with juicy acidity adding spine and lift. Refuses to let up on the spicy, floral finish, which features velvety tannins and a whiplash of sweet dark berries and floral pastilles.