Argentina Annual Report: Up Into the Andes, But Still on Solid Ground

With over 2,150 wines rated so far in 2022, this is our most extensive tasting report yet on Argentina. Our top wines once again showcase Argentina’s capability for producing world-class offerings with immense drinkability and a unique sense of place, whether regional blends or single-parcel bottlings. And among a promising if not overly diverse array of wines, malbec remains Argentina’s greatest asset. It represented 46 percent of the wines we tasted and gave us five of the six wines we rated 99 points or higher, as well as one perfect-scoring wine: the Viña Cobos Malbec Mendoza Cobos 2019.

This 100-pointer is “an archetypal malbec from Argentina,” said James Suckling, who tasted it with Viña Cobos founder Paul Hobbs, the famous winemaker from California. It’s the best the grape has to offer: a full body and compact core of dark forest fruit accompanied by sensationally fine tannins – present but almost invisible, lending itself more to texture and mouthfeel. And it was made from one of the best harvests in the last decade.

“2019 was a stunning growing season,” Hobbs, said, with a wet January followed by a beautifully dry, cool and uniform ripening period in February, resulting in wines that are “coming out with incredible structure [in] each of the different types of terroirs that we work with.”

'ARCHETYPAL MALBEC': Paul Hobbs on the Viña Cobos Malbec Mendoza 2019 and Argentina's diversity.

A NEW PATH. Herve Birnie-Scott and Marcos Fernandez of  Terrazas de los Andes on Mendoza's innovative winemaking.

Among those terroirs, high-altitude vineyards are becoming more popular and are now being planted in regions that were once marginal, like San Pablo and Chacayes. Take Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy’s Terrazas de los Andes, for example: they were the first to plant in Gualtallary, and their El Espinillo is the appellation’s highest vineyard, at 1,650 meters. And last year they purchased two more vineyards in Chacayes, at 1,500 meters and 1,350 meters.

“Chacayes is the next big thing,” said Marcos Fernandez, winemaking director of Terrazas de los Andes. He believes that the relatively new appellation has great potential for making beautifully aromatic wines from malbec. “In the past, we didn't use to talk about spices for malbec. But Chacayes has [aromas of] rosemary, harissa … and sometimes black pepper [and] cassis,” he said.

The relatively small region in the Andean foothills of the Uco Valley was first planted by the Lurton family in the late 1990s. Francois Lurton’s Bodega Piedra Negra has been joined in recent years by a handful of producers like Viña Cobos, Terrazas, Zuccardi, El Enemigo, Susana Balbo, Casa de Uco, Corazon del Sol and others.

Terrazas de los Andes Malbec Los Chacayes Valle de Uco Lican Parcel N 12S 2019 was one of our top five malbecs, showing extraordinary purity of fruit and exuding aromas of licorice, black fruit, wet earth and mountain air: a great expression of malbec with depth and concentration yet freshness and minerality. Made from grapes from a single parcel at 1,250 meters, it exemplifies growing interest in showcasing terroir through single-parcel bottlings in the last couple of decades.

“I think we are getting away from a pret-a-porter approach of the region to an haute-couture approach with this terroir,” said Patrick d'Aulan, the owner of Alta Vista, who sees producers seeking to express “not only specific terroir, but even inside the terroir.”

Alta Vista was one of the pioneers for high-altitude, single-vineyard malbecs in Argentina, bottling their first single-vineyard malbec over 20 years ago, according to d’Aulan.

And in our tastings this year, made from their oldest vineyard at 100 years old, the Alta Vista Malbec Las Compuertas Luján de Cuyo Single Vineyard Alizarine 2018 impressed with its fragrance and expressive core of wild red fruit, with a characteristic silkiness to the firm tannin frame.

Further north in the Uco Valley, at 1,450 meters altitude in Gualtallary, Catena Zapata produces a series of vibrant single-parcel malbecs and chardonnays from Adrianna Vineyard, where altitude and calcium carbonate-rich soils result in wines with high natural acidity. And once again, Catena Zapata Chardonnay Mendoza Adrianna Vineyard White Bones 2020 was our highest-rated white wine.

It is consistently one of the top chardonnays in the southern hemisphere, even in the world. From a single 2.5-hectare parcel of one of the most extensively studied vineyards in the world, White Bones 2020 has a fascinatingly expressive and aromatic profile, with a range of flowers, herbs, minerals and even sourdough-like aromas that could be attributed to native yeasts and small amounts of that natural flor that forms in some years.

"What's different about the White Bones sector is that there's more crumbled white material," said managing director Laura Catena, who extended a handful of white crushed stones toward the camera as evidence during our Zoom call. "The theory is that this calcium carbonate is very rich in microbes. Some of the complexity and some of the aromas and flavors might actually come from this microbial activity that affects the yeasts, fermentation, absorption of nutrients."

READ MORE: TOP 100 WINES OF ARGENTINA 2021

TASTING CATENA ZAPATA: Associate Editor Claire Nesbitt tastes Catena Zapata's newest releases with Laura Catena and Alejandro Vigil.

Adrianna Vineyard produces stunning malbecs too, of course. All of Catena Zapata’s malbec vines are ungrafted and taken from massale selections. With climate change, the prevalence of grafting has increased in Argentina with a preference for rootstocks adapted to lower water availability due to climate change.

“It's really extraordinary what we have in Argentina,” Catena said. “In Europe, so much was reduced to a few clones … after phylloxera because people were looking for higher yields.”

The powerful Catena Zapata Malbec Mendoza Adrianna Vineyard River 2020, previously labelled as River Stone, has an exceptional nose of wild black fruit, spice, pine cones and iodine, alongside crushed stones and bark.

The minerality and cool fruit character is underpinned by creamy and very fine tannins – a characteristic shared among many of the best malbecs we have tasted.

Catena attributes this to a change in winemaking in the last 20 years, in addition to Argentinian malbec’s intrinsic supple tannin quality.

"I think that's one of the big revolutions … questioning why we were making malbec like cabernet sauvignon, when actually what we're trying to preserve are the florals and the delicate aromatics. And we already have smooth tannins, so we don't need a long maceration to soften the tannins,” she said.

Malbec’s greatest quality could be its adaptability to terroir and ability to excel in all of Argentina, from southern Patagonia to northern Salta and Jujuy. And this may explain why an increasing number of top cuvées are coming from single sites, rather than blends.

“It turns its ego down,” Santiago Achaval, the winemaker and founder of Matervini winery, in Mendoza, said of the varietal. “When it finds a terroir that has character, has potency, has something to say, malbec takes a step back from its own personality and allows the terroir to shine through.”

From vines planted at 1,600 meters in the north of Mendoza, Matervini Malbec Las Heras El Challao Piedras Viejas Terrazas 2020 is a serious, full-bodied expression, wonderfully supple and fragrant with a wealth of dark berry, dried flower and sandalwood aromas. Matervini has also bottled a new wine, Laderas 2020, from grapes grown on the north- and south-facing slopes of a small limestone-rich hill within the Piedras Viejas vineyard.

Achaval explained that while blending gives a wine complexity, it loses the personality of the specific vineyard sites. “You can't take a wine that is sexy and a wine that is austere and have some personality in the middle of that.”

FRESHNESS AND DRINKABILITY

In tandem with a terroir-specific focus, winemakers are employing a less heavy-handed approach in the winery. Terrazas de los Andes, for instance, has undergone a change in style over the last few vintages and is using less wood (a third of Parcel N 12S 2019 was aged in amphora), making more balanced and drinkable wines that typically contain 14 percent alcohol or less.

They are not alone. Herve Birnie-Scott, the estate director of Terrazas de los Andes, identified a collective aim of top producers to “address the over-ripeness, the over-extraction and the over-woody wines, [instead] showing the grapes and showing the place."

MATERVINI'S MALBEC: Santiago Achaval on Matervini's 2019 and 2020 vintages.

Susana Balbo, winemaker of the eponymous winery, also acknowledged fine-tuning her style since 2010: “Before, we used to have 200 percent oak, which is not what it is today.”

Balbo now uses about 80 percent new oak in her top wine, Nosotros. A classy, complex and focused red, Susana Balbo Wines Malbec Paraje Altamira Nosotros Single Vineyard Nómade 2019 was another of our top five malbecs. It shows great minerality and fine-tuned savoriness, with real harmony and length.

Balbo is among many winemakers experimenting with different materials and shapes in the winery, such as large 2,000- to 3,000-liter concrete eggs. And wineries like Zuccardi have even designed their own 3,000-liter egg-shaped fermenters.

“I love the round shape: there are no corners, which gives very homogeneous wines with good tension,” said Zuccardi winemaker Sebastian Zuccardi.

Zuccardi’s top wines are all unoaked, including their 2019 malbecs from the 1,100-meter Finca Piedra Infinita vineyard in Paraje Altamira. These are among the best that we have tasted: complex, brooding and cerebral. Zuccardi Malbec Valle de Uco Paraje Altamira Finca Piedra Infinita 2019 in particular is a powerful, intrinsic malbec with impeccable balance.

In pursuit of drinkability, winemakers like Zuccardi and Catena believe that inclusion of whole bunches in fermentation helps provide freshness, tension and structure, allowing shorter maceration times and less extraction and oak usage. Catena proposed that winemaking techniques such as whole-cluster fermentation and partial carbonic maceration are an effort to make softer and more elegant wines, inspired by methods for pinot noir.

And although malbec continues to receive deserved praise, a few stunning pinot noirs have disproportionate representation at the top of our tastings.

Our top two pinots were once again from Bodega Chacra in Patagonia. Chacra’s wines at once prove that Argentina’s love affair with malbec is stronger than ever while also showing great potential for Burgundian grapes.

“It’s so hard to make bad wine here – the protagonist here is nature,” said Chacra’s founder, Piero Incisa della Rocchetta. At this southerly latitude, there is a long growing season with an impressive temperature range, with high levels of natural acidity in grapes. And at extremely low humidity, Incisa della Rochetta said, there is little disease, eliminating the need for chemical treatments and thus facilitating Chacra’s biodynamic philosophy. He expressed surprise that investment in winemaking in Patagonia is still low, perhaps slowed during the past couple of years by the pandemic, although a number of wineries from Mendoza have recently started making wines in the region.

From vines planted in 1932 and 1955, this year’s top pinots were Chacra Pinot Noir Patagonia Treinta y Dos 2020 (the 2018 vintage was JamesSuckling.com’s Wine of the Year in 2020) and Chacra Pinot Noir Patagonia Cincuenta y Cinco 2021. Both are mineral, fresh and full of tension. Cincuenta y Cinco 2021 shined this year: perfumed and floral, with delightful rose petal, red and citrus fruit notes throughout. The Treinta y Dos 2020 was more focused and structured, with a mineral, tea-like tannin quality.

Bodega Chacra’s chardonnays, made in collaboration with Burgundy’s Jean-Marc Roulot, are taut and intellectual while remaining immensely drinkable. The grapes for Chacra Chardonnay are from vines grafted onto merlot vines of 40 years of age or more. The Chacra Chardonnay Patagonia 2021 – elegant, precise yet powerful – was one of our top three chardonnays and on par with the pinots, yet again demonstrating Patagonia’s potential for Burgundian varieties.

Even further south in Chubut, Otronia makes wines at one of the most extreme southerly latitudes in the world, below the 45th parallel. We were highly impressed with their chardonnay, Otronia Chardonnay Patagonia Block III & VI 2019. Flinty, textured and mouth-watering, it shows excellent intensity and minerality.

Varietal pinot noir only represented 4 percent of our tastings. While there were a number of excellent wines in the 90–94-point range, only nine wines were rated 95 points or higher. With high expectations from Patagonia, we were nevertheless surprised in our tastings: in competition with Chacra, our other top pinots came from Mendoza. In fact, we were blown away by one in particular: Domaine Nico Pinot Noir Valle de Uco Soeur et Freres Le Paradis 2020 is nuanced and seductive, with fascinating aromas of red and orange fruit, herbs, and savory, smoky minerality. It’s full-bodied, extremely serious and tense, with mind-blowing complexity.

READ MORE: OUR TOP 100 WNES OF 2021

PATAGONIAN MAGIC: Piero Incisa della Rocchetta of Bodega Chacra on what makes Patagonian wines unique.

TRAPICHE TERROIR: Marcelo Belmonte on Trapiche's single-vineyard wines.

Another high-end, single-parcel pinot was Bemberg Estate Wines Pinot Noir Los Arboles Valle de Uco Las Piedras Parcela 12 La Linterna 2018: precise, refined and tightly wound, with very fine yet firm tannins. Grapes are dry-farmed at 1,300 meters in the relatively cooler, wetter Los Arboles region, which has more than double the rainfall of Gualtallary, 30 kilometers to the south.

Almost a third of our tastings were from 2020. After a trio of successful vintages from 2017, Argentina seems to have been blessed with a fourth excellent vintage, although some winemakers expressed a preference for 2019. 2020 was drier and warmer, especially in the summer and at harvest in March.

“The ripening of grapes was fast,” Sebastian Zuccardi said. “We could have had some overripe grapes, but it turned out to be OK, as our vineyard was not stressed.”

Greater understanding over the past couple of decades has led to more careful treatment of the vines and the soils, and this was paramount to retaining fresh grapes in a warmer vintage like 2020. Techniques like precision irrigation – watering the vines specifically in response to hydropressure and sap flow measurements – are employed by some wineries like Terrazas to manage hydric stress.

“You only give the vine what it needs,” said Birnie-Scott. “It adapts to the drought and requests less water when you don't give it enough.”

Harvest dates are also an important decision in determining balance and style of wine. Birnie-Scott described picking “al dente” – that is, harvesting grapes when they are just ripe. “I could wait one more week and have deeper, more intense fruit, but I would lose this zesty red character, I would lose natural acidity, I would lose many things,” he said.

Most of our highest-rated wines reflected this endeavor from producers to make fresher wines.

PIONERO AND LA LINTERNA: Daniel Pi of Bemberg Estate talks with Claire Nesbitt about his red wines.

GRAPES FOR THE FUTURE?

With rising temperatures, some producers believe that varieties like cabernet sauvignon have a strong future.

"I'm extremely hot on cabernet sauvignon for the region," said Paul Hobbs, although he admitted that it is not as easy to grow and vinify in Argentina as malbec. It requires much more attention to detail in the vineyard. “It's not as forgiving as malbec,” Hobbs said. “You can let malbec kind of go and end up with a pretty good thing, but you can't do that with cabernet sauvignon.”

With even more alluvial, well-draining soils than in Napa Valley, alongside high elevation, warm summers and cool falls, Argentina’s climate and terroirs “play beautifully into high-end cabernet,” Hobbs said.

And perhaps counterintuitively, vineyards further north may fare well because of their altitude. Jeff Mausbach, who makes some 80 wines across Argentina, such as Tinto Negro, Estancia Uspallata and Estancia de los Cardones, has recently added new wines to his portfolio, which is made from extremely high vineyards like Cielo Arriba, at 2,700 meters in Jujuy, and Almacen de la Quebrada, at 2,450 meters in Salta.

“When you are in very extreme vineyards … areas that are 2,000-plus meters, the final ripening is happening in very cold temperatures,” Mausbach said. “We are talking about temperatures under 70 Fahrenheit, with low temperatures sometimes into the 30s.”

We found a unique peppery, dried herb and perfumed profile in these wines from extreme altitude, where the UV rays are more intense – the malbecs almost resemble cool climate syrah.

A PARTNER FOR MALBEC

Cabernet franc, meanwhile, is much loved by many producers we talked to. Although Hobbs noted that "cabernet franc doesn't have the popularity, worldwide recognition that cabernet sauvignon does," the top cabernet francs we tasted were higher scoring, with spectacular examples from El Enemigo, Cobos and Matias Riccitelli in Mendoza. But it is also a useful blending companion for malbec, adding freshness even in stressful soil types.

"Cabernet franc is very good in Argentina, it's like the best partner for malbec," said Marcelo Belmonte, director of winemaking at Trapiche. Trapiche Malbec Cabernet Franc Mendoza Iscay 2018, which used to be made from a blend of malbec with merlot, is Trapiche’s most popular wine: perfumed, with an abundance of juicy berry fruit alongside peppery and zesty hints. As for varietal cabernet franc, the single-vineyard expressions from El Enemigo – El Enemigo Cabernet Franc Agrelo Luján de Cuyo Gran Enemigo Single Vineyard 2018 and El Enemigo Cabernet Franc El Cepillo Mendoza Gran Enemigo Single Vineyard 2018 – were at the top of our tastings, both wonderfully fragrant with intense peppery spice and mineral notes.

While some 2021s in our tastings are lighter and less concentrated than previous vintages, perhaps due to cooler and wetter conditions than 2020, it may be too soon to generalise about the year, as some top wines have yet to be bottled. The best we have tasted, whites in particular, show beautifully perfumed fruit profiles. Check out the Matias Riccitelli Mendoza Blanco de la Casa 2021, a unique blend of semillon, sauvignon blanc and chardonnay, with subtle but intense flavors of jasmine tea, lime and chalk.

Nevertheless, some producers we spoke with said it was a good harvest despite the rain and other challenging conditions. “2021 was humid and cold, it was late, so we didn’t need to rush,” said Philippe Rolet, manager of Bodegas Caro, the joint venture between DBR Lafite and the Catena family in Mendoza. “We could wait for full maturity and for me it was why we had reached good concentration.”

2022 wines have not been bottled yet, but producers have expressed excitement about the quality of grapes. After a cool spring and a wet summer, with the threat of mildew and botrytis in some areas, the end of February and March were cool and dry.

“It was a gold mine,” said Birnie-Scott, of Terrazas de los Andes. “From veraison to the harvest was just cool: cool nights, no excess temperature during the day, dry and relatively low yield – we had the lowest harvest in five years. We had a good level of concentration but no harshness.”

Terrazas de los Andes harvested relatively early, before the end of March, avoiding a challenging cold front at the end of the month that left ice on the vines.

Belmonte, from Trapiche, also expressed enthusiasm: "I'm very positive about the quality of 2022. It's a lower-yielding vintage … very high-quality tannins, a lot of color – just natural color. Beautiful."

Argentina seems to be stepping toward greatness and prices at the top end are inching upward, with the average bottle price of the top 21 wines (at 98+ points) at $146. Yes, there are still many excellent quality wines at varying price points, with large-scale yet quality-conscious producers such as Trapiche offering a wide range of bottlings. But the higher-end producers are investing more than ever in the vineyard and in the winery. And with more emphasis on site selection and precision in the vineyard and winery, winemakers are making ever more intellectual wines that remain supremely approachable.

“What’s more,” as Mausbach put it, “we like to drink more than one glass.”

– Claire Nesbitt, Associate Editor