Dr Vino's wine blog

Have you ever wondered why there are so few Americans in Argentina’s wine country while the French and Chileans seem to know their way around Mendoza? When I was there, I did. So I explored the issue in an article that appeared in the January issue of Wine Business Monthly, now available online.

Have you ever thought about how wineries use the internet to market wine? Or why sports fans are asking for “mas vino” instead of a nice cold one? Or whether Costco will make the three-tier system crumble? Then fire up your iTunes and listen to the most recent installment of “Unfiltered,” a podcast hosted by Tim Elliot of Winecast. I joined four others to taste wine and chew the fat. Oh no wait, since we were in four different time zones and connected via Skype, there was no imbibing (at least collectively), just talking.

tags: wine | argentina | podcast

There’s a lot of talk these days about “grower champagnes,” sparkling wines made in the Champagne region by the grape growers themselves (see my backgrounder). In all the rush to talk about this farmer fizz, the fact that growers also make bubbly outside of Champagne sometimes gets lost.

When I was in Argentina earlier this year, I tried some of the local bubbly. Moet controls the Argentine market for bubbly through its local subsidiary. In fact, their local label has risen to a level of brand awareness on par with Kleenex and Xerox. Instead of asking for a glass of “champagne” Argentines mostly ask for a glass of “Chandon.”

The sparkling wines made at the Mendoza Chandon winery serve many Latin American markets but don’t ever go north of Panama. Domaine Chandon in Napa provides American domestic sparklers to the US market alongside the Champagne brands in the LVMH portfolio such as Moet, Veuve Clicquot, and Krug.

In Argentina, Pascual Toso plays the Avis of the bubbly market to Moet’s Hertz. This family-owned company has been making wine since 1880 and now provides something like five percent of the bubbly to the Argentine domestic market. But unlike Chandon Argentina, which you would have to go there to taste, Toso brut is exported to the US. It is a blanc des blancs made of chardonnay and chenin blanc. If you’re looking for a bargain bubbly, to stock for a large party or simply for a break on the budget, the Toso retails for between $6-8 in the US (find this wine). Light in color, with notes of yeasty brioche, it’s some farmer fizz that will add bubbles to your budget.

tags: wine | bubbly | LVMH

How do winemaking and terroir affect malbec? We put this to the test recently with a leading wine from Argentina’s Mendoza region and the Cahors in France where the grape is also known as cot.

On my trip to Mendoza earlier this year, one of the most exciting wineries I visited was the Clos de los Siete project. Seven French investors, including many wine making families such as Rothschild (Lafite) and Cuvelier (Poyferré) joined forces under the teutalage of Michel Rolland, the “flying winemaker” par excellence who is also a stakeholder. They bought a vast plot of 850 heactares (over 2000 acres) in the Val de Uco at the base of the Andes and planted a small sea of vines, mostly malbec.

Each of the families either makes or will make their own wine but collectively they pool some grapes to make the Clos de los Siete wine, available for about $15 (Find this wine). This 2003 is mostly malbec but also includes some cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, and some syrah (!).

Against this wine, I poured blind the 2002 Clos la Coutale, which I bought in NYC for about $12 (Find this wine). From Cahors, the Clos La Coutale, a blend of mostly malbec with a little merlot and cab franc, is imported to the US by Kermit Lynch.

One wine exploded with rich aromas and flavors of violets, blackberries and tobacco from the glass. It had a round, soft complex mouthfeel and a good finish. The second wine was inky dark in color, and had a much more truncated flavor range with a certain tartness on the finish.

After the unveiling, wine #1 was the Clos de los Siete and wine #2 was the Cahors.

Although the malbec from Mendoza showed better that evening, a note of caution is necessary because of the 15 percent alcohol stated on the label. It’s big. The complexity would probably make a great BBQ wine for those tired of zinfandel.

This wine reminded me of a Cadillac Escalade: it’s fun to take it for a spin once, but who wants to own it and pay the gas bill? Drink too much of this one and you may be paying for it the next day.

* * * * *

Now in France, I found a bottle of the Clos la Coutale 2003 and tried it. The bottle showed much better–more full-bodied, more round, more complex, and even “bigger.” Pity I couldn’t taste this much better vintage against the Clos de los Siete. Especially since I got it for 7 euros ($8.90). Ah well, I’ll throw it in a future malbec match-up with some more wines from the two regions.

tags: wine | malbec | wine tasting

Pascual Toso, Mendoza, Malbec reserve 2004. $13 find this wine

On my recent trip to Argentina, the jovial Ernesto Toso picked me up in his beat-up sedan and drove me from downtown Mendoza to his family winery in the Barrancas area, about 45 minutes. Overlooking a dry river bed that had channeled into the ground like a miniature Grand Canyon, I tasted the line of wines made at the winery with Paul Hobbs from Sonoma, California as consulting winemaker. The real sweet spot in terms of quality to price was the Malbec reserve with wonderful aromas of dark fruits and a hint of vanilla to complement a luscious mouthfeel and soft tannins. The straight malbec (about $8) is a good approximation but spring for the reserve if your budget permits. Fire up the grill and pull the cork! I also tried the $100 Magdalena 2002 (find this wine), which was no doubt a powerful and serious wine but at that lofty price point I couldn’t help but think about other wines I could have—or even nine bottles of the malbec reserve. Importer: TGIC imports.

tags: wine | tasting notes | malbec

Sorbus, cabernet/malbec, Mendoza, 2004. $6 find this wine

The other day a friend poured me some $6 Borsao, a wine that I discovered several years ago as a go-to value. Well, move over Borsao, here comes something meatier. A phenomenal value, this Sorbus displays the depth that a cab-malbec blend can give and has that same, crowd pleasing “ah” of the Ruca Malen Yauquen. I found it at PJ’s Wine in Manhattan for the bargain price of $5.97. This is one to buy by the case! Importer: Mediterranean Wine Co, Dover, NJ.

tags: wine | tasting notes

As I headed to Mendoza, I was haunted by a couple of sentences Eric Asimov recently wrote from a Wines of the Times tasting panel on Malbec:

“…words came readily enough to sum up the tasting — two-dimensional, narrow-gauge, simple. Nothing wrong with those words, but not very many thrills among them.”

Chilling stuff for the traveler to Malbec Country! I didn’t really understand what “two-dimensional” meant but it certainly sounded like damning with faint praise. When I was on the ground, I put the question to Manuel Louzada, winemaker at Domaine Chandon. His reply came with a sketch on his tasting mat, which I attempted to recreate here:

Essentially he said he could understand such a criticism because Malbec has a good attack and very good midpalate while it trails off at the finish. (If you think an attack is a military or a soccer term you’d be right; in wine tasting it also means how the wine tastes when it first enters your mouth—besides wet).

The other various arcs show the profile of other grapes. Tempranillo (blue, above) has a good attack, weaker midpalate, and a strong finish. Cabernet (red) has a similar arc he suggested but not quite as much on the attack. Syrah (yellow) has a broad midpalate but is kind of weak on the attack and the finish. Pinot Noir (green) has a finish that goes on and on—when done right.

This explains why some of the most expensive wines from the region are blends. The $70 Cheval des Andes 2003 (find this wine), perhaps my favorite of the big boy “grand cru” wines I tasted in Mendoza, is a blend of Malbec and Cab to give it a full style. Paul Hobbs added 5 percent Cab to his $100 Magadalena Toso (find this wine). And the $85 Nicolas Catena Zapata 2002 (find this wine) is a 72-28 blend of Cab and Malbec. This makes sense since Malbec has traditionally been a blender in Bordeaux and the Loire. Looking at the graphic above, a blend of the red and the black lines hits all the highs.

“The force of the Cabernet is softened by the Malbec,” José Galante winemaker at Catena said. “We make the best wine that we can in the Nicolás Catena Zapata.”

The various vineyard sites also have different tasting arcs for the same variety Galante said (see my notes on tasting Menodoza’s terroir). He works to blend those and give the single varietal wines more heft and character.

But what about Malbec on its own? “Malbec is sexy, it seduces,” said Manuel Louzada of Chandon. Indeed, this traditional backup singer is ready for a starring role. The prolonged growing season for the grapes in this high desert, which can have 50 percent more growing days than cool Bordeaux, makes the tannins in the Malbecs from Mendoza sweet and approachable. For white wine fans who object to the dryness or mouth-chomping tannins in Cabernet, reach for a Malbec from Argentina and you will not only have a wine that is easy on the palate but also easy on the wallet. If Malbec wines are two-dimensional, then the world is flat.

I’m frustrated by the lack of a good wine map for Mendoza. But I guess that’s testimony to the “undiscovered” nature of the destination.

The one above shows the general lay of the land with the main growing areas of Maipu and Lujan de Cuyo moving out from the city of Mendoza (see this topo/satellite/weather map. Further south is the Uco Valley with many wonderful wineries and 200km south of the city lies San Rafael, home to Famiglia Bianchi among others. I didn’t visit San Rafael on my trip but I did visit the other regions.

There’s an incredible vitality to Mendoza. The region is experiencing a boom. Foreign direct investment, particularly from France and Chile, is pouring in to vineyards and fancy new wineries are going up everywhere. Several locals told me that unemployment is at 6 percent, well below the national average of 20 percent. Demand for luxury hotels is such that the Park Hyatt is often full and two other five-star hotels are being built. And there are luxury boutique hotels such as the 14-room Cavas Wine Lodge sprouting in the vineyards themselves.

The Andes provide a dramatic backdrop for the city as well as plenty of activities for tourists, from hiking to rafting. But it’s the wineries that I went for and I wondered, does terroir matter? Or put more simply, are there different microclimates in Mendoza?

It is always hard to decipher the influence of the vineyard as opposed to the influence of the winemaker. So I had an excellent chance to taste the terroir in the very cool tasting room at Alta Vista with three Malbecs from different vineyards made by the same winemaker. Patrick d’Aulan and family sold the Champagne house Piper-Heidsieck in 1999 and still owns Chateau Sansonnet in Bordeaux, purchased this winery in 1998 and started restoring it and acquiring properties. They now have four vineyard sites including 540 acres in the Clos de los Siete project in the Uco Valley area of Vista Flores (planted in 2002; the d’Aulans have since left the venture).

The other three vineyards are much smaller and run from south to north in Mendoza. La Consulta is a cool-climate, 17-acre vineyard south of even the Uco Valley at the base of the Andes; the Alto Agrelo vineyard is 225 acres an situated in Lujan de Cuyo; and the 17 acre La Consulta is the closest to the city of Mendoza and has a wide temperature fluctuation between high and low. They all lie at more or less the same altidue, about 3500 feet, and about 33 degrees south of the equator. The Alta Vista premium line of Malbec has a limited production of wine bottled from each vineyard site and they are only sold as a boxed set (about $50). While American consumers no doubt have difficulty distinguishing between the various subregions, Argentine laws on place names don’t provide much help since only generic geographic indications, such as Mendoza, are allowed much to the chagrin of many winemakers I met. Alta Vista overcame this problem by including the vineyard name as the brand name for the wine.

I tasted the wines in the order of the vineyards above and they were dscribed as ranging from “elegant and feminine,” to medium, to bold. Well, if the if the La Consulta one is feminine, the woman rides a Harley. While I liked the wine with its aromas of violets, it was still big and lush with a gorgeous mouthfeel. The third wine from Las Compuertas was perhaps more “manly” since on the finish was a rare dose of mouth chomping tannins.

My favorite wine was the middle of the road “Serenade” from Alto Agrelo. Inky purple in color, the attack draws you in with notes of plums, dark cherries, a faint whiff of asado, and lush, velvety mouthfeel. Although the wine sees some oak, it is harmoniously balanced with the fruit and the tannins are sweet.

All in all, the Alta Vista terroir experiment was very instructive and a very good overview of the different vineyard characterisics. It’s a pity it isn’t more widely available in the US–I guess you’ll have to go there to check it out for yourself.

Alta Vista: Alzaaga 3972, M5528AKJ, Chacras de Coria, Menodza, Argentina. Open for visits–check the Alta Vista web site for more info, vineyard maps and photos here. Also, see additional wine maps of Mendoza here.

tags: wine | Argentina | Mendoza | Terroir | Alta Vista | travel

Alta Vista Torrontes, Mendoza, 2004 $9 (find this wine)
The best white wine that I had on my recent trip to Argentina I had on the first day at Cabaña Las Lilas restaurant in the hip Puerto Madera area of Buenos Aires: Alta Vista Torrontes. And it kept popping up on the trip as I tasted it two more times (including at the winery with the 05) and loved it each time. “Aromatic” is a way that Torrontes frequently gets described but perfumed might be more accurate. White peach, honeysuckle blossom, perhaps even lychee conspire in an hugely rich and expressive aroma that is not for the faint of heart. The wine has crisp acidity and is totally dry (2g residual sugar) despite the vortex of aromas. While this wine is a little bit hard to find in the US, an able substitute is the Santa Julia Torrontes, which has wider availability (Whole Foods) can be found for as low as $6. Pair with Asian foods or try it as an aperitif. Either way, a torrent of flavor will be yours!

tags: wine | Argentina | Torrontes

I’ve started a photo set on flickr of my trip to Argentina. Check it out!

tags: wine | Argentina | photos