Rafael Nadal enters the wine business with El Tenista.

Rafa Nadal has entered the wine business with the launch of a new label called El Tenista, a project the former Spanish tennis star said grew out of a long relationship with the Gil family, one of the best-known wine-producing groups in Spain.

Nadal announced the new venture on social media this week, describing it as a shared project built over time with Viñas Familia Gil, a winery group based in Jumilla, in the southeastern region of Murcia. The 22-time Grand Slam singles champion said the wine reflects a common view of effort, consistency and daily work, values he said he shares with the family behind the company.

“There are projects that make you especially excited, and this is one of them,” Nadal wrote in Spanish on Instagram. He said he had been working for some time with the Gil family on the creation of El Tenista and that he was happy to be part of the project and to learn from a family with deep experience in wine.

The wine is tied to a broader vineyard recovery effort in Jumilla. The project centers on old Monastrell vines that had appeared headed for abandonment before being brought back into production. The vineyards are located at about 750 meters above sea level, and local reports said the vines are more than 50 years old. El Tenista is the first wine to come to market under a new project called Dominio del Liftado.

Production will be limited. Spanish media reports said yields are about 700 grams of grapes per vine and that the harvest is carried out by hand. The wine is described by the winery as an organic red that spends about 18 months in new French oak barrels before further aging in bottle. In tasting notes released by the producer, the wine is said to show ripe black fruit, Mediterranean scrub, vanilla and sweet spice, with a firm structure, soft tannins and a long finish.

Neither Nadal nor the winery provided a full public breakdown of the blend in the initial announcement, but the wine is closely linked to Monastrell, the traditional grape of Jumilla and one of the varieties most associated with Murcia’s dry inland vineyards. The area is known for old bush vines and for wines made under hot conditions but with significant day-night temperature shifts at higher elevations.

For Nadal, the move adds another business line to a portfolio that has expanded since the end of his playing career. He is already involved in the Rafa Nadal Academy, the ZEL hotel brand and real estate investments. The new wine label places him among a growing group of current and former athletes who have moved into wine production, either as owners, partners or brand ambassadors.

The Gil family is one of the largest and most established names in Spanish wine, with operations in several regions. Its Jumilla roots are especially strong, and the company has played a major role in raising the profile of the region’s Monastrell-based wines in export markets. That experience appears central to the project with Nadal, who does not come from the wine trade but has attached his name to a product built around local vineyards and an existing producer with broad reach.

The launch also gives Nadal a new public role tied to rural land use and agricultural recovery. The project’s backers have presented El Tenista not only as a celebrity label but also as a way to preserve old vines that might otherwise have disappeared. In Spanish wine regions, the survival of old vineyards has become an increasingly important issue as growers face low profitability, changing labor conditions and pressure to replace low-yielding plots with more productive agriculture or to leave them uncultivated.

That context helps explain the emphasis on the vineyard itself in the project’s presentation. Rather than beginning with a new planting, the partners chose to focus on mature vines in a zone already known for quality red wine. The result is a product positioned as small in volume and linked to origin, with Nadal’s name used as the label but not as the only selling point.

Nadal did not announce pricing or a broad release schedule in his public remarks, and the winery’s initial communication focused more on the story of the collaboration and the first production details than on commercial distribution. Early reports in Spanish and Italian media described the bottling as a limited edition, a factor likely to increase interest among collectors and Nadal fans as well as wine buyers.

The announcement comes as celebrity involvement in the wine business continues to spread across Europe and beyond. In Spain, athletes have increasingly invested in vineyards and wineries or collaborated on branded bottlings. Nadal’s entry stands out because of his global profile and because the project is tied to one of Spain’s most recognizable wine families rather than a start-up created from scratch.

In his message, Nadal framed the project in personal terms, saying he was glad to share the path with the Gil family and hoped people would enjoy the wine as much as they do. The first bottle released under that partnership, El Tenista, now becomes part of the growing overlap between elite sports, lifestyle branding and Spain’s wine industry.