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Malbec becomes Argentina’s flagship red wine
I wish to report, modestly, that I wrote a wine column in May 1997 that started like this:
“You read it here first: Malbec, given time, will be the finest wine to come from Argentina. It will put that country’s arid, isolated wine country on the world map.”
Today I submit that it has happened, in spades.
Malbec came to Miami first because of our cultural connections to South America. Today it’s all over the wine world, by far Argentina’s most popular export wine. And amazingly, you will find tasting notes here for two malbecs that still cost only $6 each.
What we’ve learned since 1997 is that malbec is malleable. It can be turned into a pretty good $6 wine – nothing you’d cellar for decades, but a rich, fruity, user-friendly everyday wine. And it can be turned into a $55 stunner that’s little short of majestic.
Centuries ago, malbec was a minor grape used along with cabernet sauvignon, merlot, petit verdot and cabernet in the blending of France’s vaunted Bordeaux reds. It was inky black and hard as nails in France’s maritime climate, and was used to add color and structure to the wines.
In Argentina, on the sunny eastern slopes of the Andes around Mendoza with their hot days and cold nights, high altitudes, near total lack of rainfall and poor soils, malbec was transformed. In a blind tasting, I would identify it as tasting just like those Brach’s candies: black cherries and dark chocolate, sweet, rich and creamy.
At Trapiche, Argentina’s biggest winery with 2,500 acres divided into dozens of vineyards under dozens of growers, all malbec winemaking is concentrated under a single winemaker, Daniel Pi.
Each year Trapiche chooses three of its top growers and bottles their wines exclusively for distribution. One of them this year is the “Icons” single-vineyard malbec by grower Adolfo Ahumada, from 3,000 feet up the Andes at Valle de Uco.
Another top winery, Michel Torino Estate, makes malbec with organic grapes, fertilizing with sheep manure (Aren’t you glad to know?), cutting weeds with machetes, adding less sulfur as a preservative in the final produce.
So enjoy. Just don’t tell the Argentines how good their wines are. I’m afraid they’ll jack up their prices.