World Malbec Day Review: 2014 Bodega Norton Barrel Select Malbec

17 04 2017

[This bottle was provided as a sample for review purposes.]

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Happy World Malbec Day!

Happy belated Easter to all – I hope your long weekend was filled with family and food and chocolate and wine in some order.  If you headed back to work on Easter Monday and were feeling the post-holiday blues, fear not, because there is another event on today that’s worth celebrating:  April 17th has been designated World Malbec Day, a designation I would bet many people choose to live out far more often.  In a blink sometime in the last decade, Malbec went from being an overlooked Bordeaux blending grape and an esoteric dark and chewy hidden treasure from Cahors to Australian Shiraz’s heir as the friendly, fruity, powerful gateway drug into the wonderful world of wine.  Whereas I stumbled onto Yellow Tail sometime in the early 2000s and worked my way up from there, nascent wine lovers today are heading to the previously non-existent Argentina section of their local liquor store and starting their odyssey with the grape, one that will hopefully last a lifetime. Read the rest of this entry »





Wine Review: 2010 Dona Paula “Los Cardos” Malbec

1 02 2012

Marketing note: maybe don't name your wine after a weed.

Many apologies for the blog radio silence over the past few days:  after weeks of avoiding it, I finally ended up catching the sinus/chest cold that every single person in Calgary currently has, so I had to shut down my wine consumption until I was more or less healthy.  The worst has now passed, but I still have a bit of residual congestion, so be warned in advance that the following review could be completely inaccurate…but it’s free, so what do you care?

Malbec!  I have no idea how this is possible, but this is the very first Malbec that has been the feature of its own PnP review.  The grape that has been a part of the blend in red Bordeaux wines for centuries but that has taken the drinking world by storm in the last decade with its single-varietal Argentinian incarnation is definitely the Shiraz of the 2000s, the new red wine that offers such an inexpensive and enjoyable experience that it has put a previously-ignored winemaking country on the vinous map.  I haven’t been avoiding it on purpose — like everyone, I’m a fan of a good Malbec — but after a couple sips of this wine, I knew I was going to regret making it my initial foray into the grape.

Read the rest of this entry »