Almaviva Vertical Tasting: Cult Status Through Consistency

A vertical tasting of every vintage of Almaviva in September this year highlighted how Chile’s very best wines based on cabernet sauvignon age beautifully, even in less than outstanding vintages. The Bordeaux blend, owned by the families of France’s Mouton-Rothschild and Chile’s Concha y Toro, has shown outstanding quality through its 25 years of existence and proves that the region of Puente Alto is one of the best in the world for cabernet compared with similar prime alluvial soiled areas such as Bordeaux’s Pessac-Leognan. That’s the home to such great names as Haut-Brion and La Mission Haut-Brion.

It probably doesn’t seem like much now but creating a joint-venture project between one of the world’s most famous wine families, the Rothschilds of Mouton, and Chile’s wine dynasty Guilisasti, was visionary in many ways more than two decades ago. The vineyard growing area just outside of the capital of Santiago is ground central for great cabernet and it now includes the vineyards for Almaviva, Viña Don Melchor and Viñedo Chadwick. These three wineries are neighbors, and the area was all part of the Chadwick family estate of Viña San José de Tocornal in the Alto Maipo from the early 1940s until the 1968. Commercial wine started being made in the area as far back as the late 1800s. This is real wine history and pedigree for Chile.

The first three vintages of Almaviva were actually made at the winery of Concha y Toro a short distance away, including 1996, 1997 and 1998. In 1999, the red began to be made in its current winery in Puente Alto.

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The first winemaker for Almaviva was Patrick Leon, who also was the technical director of Mouton at the time. He was followed by Todd Mostero, who is now the winemaker for Dominus Estate in Napa. He oversaw the winemaking from 2004 to 2007. The current technical director, Michel Friou, began with the 2008 vintage and has been at Almaviva ever since.

It was easy to see how the winemaker’s hand influences the wines in the vertical tasting, which was held in my office in Italy with Friou and the current managing director of Almaviva, Manuel Louzada. The early years with Leon emphasized richness and new barrel aging while Mostero began dialing back the horsepower in the wines from 2004 onward. Friou continued with this when he took over in 2008. He continues to fine-tune his wines and focuses more on what his vineyards give him each year.

The reds of Almaviva in general still show plenty of fruit and richness but there’s always an underlying tannin tension and an earth, forest floor and stone character, most likely emanating from the unique soils of the property, which are deep in gravel and loam. The reds have always shown vintage variation, with cooler years making wines of less opulence and hotter vintages producing more fruit-forward ones.

“It’s important to have these vintage variations in any great wine,” Louzada said during the tasting. But Friou added that it wasn’t only vintage variations that made for differences in the wines. “We have the cold and hot years, and we have the early and late years,” he said. “And then you have small-berry and large-berry years, large or small yields. They are factors that really are important.”

Annual production is about 200,000 bottles from 85 hectares of vineyards planted primarily to cabernet sauvignon as well as carmenere, cabernet franc and merlot. In the beginning, only cabernet sauvignon, carmenere and cabernet franc were used in the blend, but merlot was added beginning in 2006. Petit verdot was introduced as an option in 2010.

"Petit verdot has intense color and the profile of the nose is completely different,” Friou said. “It is a very black berry and different in profile. We pick at the middle of the harvest and not at the end like in Bordeaux. It brings what is missing in the blend. It brings it at the end.”

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The two best wines of the vertical tasting were two of the most recent: 2015 and 2017. The 2015 Almaviva was the JamesSuckling.com Wine of the Year in 2018, and the 2017 was the Wine of the Decade two years later. The vintages are top of the line for Chile as a whole, producing wines of superb structure and harmony as well as complexity. The 2015 and 2017 Almavivas are both 100-point wines. The 2018 and 2020 follow close behind at 98 points.

Check out the notes below from the tasting. What’s striking is the consistency in quality from the very beginning and the wonderful ageability of the wines. The red really comes into its own about 10 to 12 years after bottling. Almaviva clearly deserves its cult status in Chile with so many outstanding quality wines from the outset to now.

– James Suckling, Editor/Chairman

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