Hey Importers! Where’s Our Cruzat Larraine?

June 1, 2009 | In WINE REVIEWS | 1 Comment

cruzatFew seem to be aware that Argentina has a terrific specialist in sparkling wines – Bodega Cruzat.  Think southern-hemi Schramsburg.  Carefully made, ambitious and captivating sparklers – clearly made for the world stage and intended to provide a high-quality, high-value alternative to the wines of Champagne. Good restaurants in Buenos Aires pour this stuff almost to a turn.  American expat living in Chile, Liz Caskey, blogged her recent visit to the winery here, which reminded us that we love this stuff too… and it remains our favorite-wine-we-had-all-over-Argentina-but-can’t-seem-to-get-at-home wine.   (As opposed to lugged-home-5,000 miles-only-to-find-it-widely-available-and-cheaper-here-wines.)  It’s time to raise the general level of chatter about just where the heck is this stuff in the Northern parts of the world?   A well-funded, modern producer, nice slick labels and fancy Flash winery website, decently large production runs, a romantic story and paternalistic “man of terroir” at the helm…. what’s the deal?

Continue reading Hey Importers! Where’s Our Cruzat Larraine?…

Weird Wine of the Week: Pulenta Estate Cabernet Franc Tardio 2004

March 18, 2009 | In WINE REVIEWS | No Comments

pulentaIs this Weird Wine? Hmm…. where to start.  First of all, botrytis cinerea, the fungus which in it’s benign form is called the “noble rot” and is responsible for some of the world’s finest sweet wines – is not supposed to make good red wines.  Botrytis feeds on the skins, where red wines get their tannins and flavor, robbing red grapes of their pigment and producing off-odors in the wine during maceration. Sweet cabernet franc is therefore more common in ice-wine country, such as Southern Ontario – where long growing seasons are combined with early freezing conditions in certain years and complex sweet wines can be made without the help of the fungus.  Secondly, at 980 metres above sea level near the city of Mendoza lies the Pulenta Estate, which is fine Argentinian wine country – dry as hell, with thin air, and perfect for ripening red grapes.   However, its not humid enough for botrytis. The fungus just doesn’t show up, preferring damp Burgundy ocean moisture or finicky Bordeaux microclimates to this land of open ranges and pantalooned gauchos.

Continue reading Weird Wine of the Week: Pulenta Estate Cabernet Franc Tardio 2004…

2006 Terrazas de los Andes Reserva Malbec

January 6, 2009 | In WINE REVIEWS | No Comments

Originally a Bordeaux grape, Malbec doesn’t get a lot of respect from the Borderlaise these days, in its last redoubt, the Bourg and the Blaye, vignerons have been uprooting Malbec and planting Merlot. Still a minor figure in the Loire Valley, where it is called Cot, it is quickly losing ground to Cabernet Franc. In the Southwest of France, it is still a presence, particularly from the rugged vineyards of Cahor- long known by the English as “the black wine” Cahors can be a mighty and long-lived wine- It is in Argentina where Malbec is king; it is in America that it has become ubiquitous- wine bars and shops, restaurants and dinner parties are replete with the stuff, for better or worse it is the Merlot of the new decade. Value priced at most quality levels, the quality variation is significant, and price isn’t a good determinant- Mendoza is the region, and most of these wines we are told come from altitudes between 400 and 1200 meters. Perhaps thats why to us at The UnCorker, so many Malbec’s taste a bit green and underripe. Malbec can be over-cropped and underripe, and still achieve fairly high sugar levels, making for a wine that, at least initially, has abundant fruit and alcohol. Add some  new oak to that and you have a big jammy wine that masks a bunch of scratchy under-ripeness, green pepper and harsh reedy tannins .  Thats where the 2006 Terrazas de los Andes Reserva Malbec comes in, grown at 1067 meters, with 13.5% alcohol, and 12 months in new oak, this wine sure does soak the fun out of wine drinking with its toasty oak, big dark fruit flavors and all of those under-ripe aspects. We at The UnCorker are sure that a time will come when the American market will stop buying anything that has Malbec written on the label(as in fact has been the case with Australian Shiraz) and make those Argentinians rethink their viticultural standards and practices.

* Editorial Note- we apologize if we have given the impression that no good Malbecs are made in Argentina, there are and we will surely write of them, however we spent good money on the above mentioned and were feeling both peeved and vexed.


Contact Us
Powered by WordPress. The UnCorker is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.