Malbec Mayhem: Malbec World Day 2022

17 04 2022

By Peter Vetsch and Raymond Lamontagne

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

Everyone’s favourite proclaimed and grammatically questionable vinous holiday has returned: April 17th, 2022 marks the 11th annual Malbec World Day, which should almost certainly be “World Malbec Day” in its English formulation but officially is not. Unfortunately for this grandiose occasion, it happens to share the stage this year with an even bigger (and actually statutory) holiday whose date roves yearly with the lunar calendar. Happy Easter, everybody: if your Malbec attention span is absorbed somewhat by Mini Eggs and chocolate rabbits and faith-based celebrations, well, fair enough, but maybe crack some Argentinian flagships with your ham tonight anyway. Unlike Easter, whose shifting date is tied to the first full moon after vernal equinox for reasons entirely unknown, Malbec World Day is always on April 17th, because on that day in 1853, Argentina’s President ordered that new French vine cuttings be brought into the country, including the first Malbec vines to hit South America. Malbec World Day is thus heavily Argentina-focused, but then, for this moment at least, so is the grape.

Aside from killer marketing (seriously, check out the opening splash page on worldmalbecday.com), there are a few other reasons why Argentina has stumbled on something special with its rendition of this grape, all tied to the astoundingly unique geography of the region. The primary vine-growing region of Mendoza is in the foothills of the mighty Andes mountain range, placing it at some of the highest altitudes on Earth for viticulture, up to 11,000 feet above sea level. Due to this absurdly elevated positioning, vines see way more sunlight (there are no clouds when you’re above the clouds), enjoy frequent breezes off the mountains which help control pests, and experience massive temperature shifts between hot days and cold nights to preserve acid and extend grape hang time, which both maximizes and controls ripeness. The result is heaven for a big red that had previously struggled to find its place. We have a sextet of Argentina’s most famous export to help us celebrate this glorious holiday(s) in style. Which Malbec will take this year’s entry-level value wine crown this year?

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Wine Review: July Patio Samplers

6 07 2019

By Peter Vetsch

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

As I sit here writing this on a rainy summer evening (pre-publication, but I bet it’s raining when this goes live too), Calgary has just struggled through a sodden June, and the tide doesn’t seem to be turning.  It is grey, dreary and continually drizzling.  We’ve had hailstorms, windstorms, thunderstorms — all separately and all in the last three weeks.  My kids have declared their nascent skepticism for outdoor sports — who would willingly place themselves outside for an hour at a time in an environment such as this?  Our northern world is free of snow for at most six months a year, and a third of that winterless period for 2019 has been underwater. You get the picture.  It’s bleak.

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So rather than wait for the appropriate meteorological scene to christen this long-planned summery-wine review set, I have decided to pre-emptively invoke summer by publishing it anyway, in the hopes that this trio of deck-and-BBQ-friendly refreshment will nudge our weather towards more appropriate activities.  I will try anything at this point.  Tonight’s bottles will set a blog record that may never be broken, bear a striking resemblance to each other until they don’t, and confirm that even trendy wines can be old-school sometimes.  They may also be the first time since the Tournament of Pink that we start off with back-to-back rosés, but hopefully we can make that a bit more of a recurring pattern.  Game on. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: Finca La Linda Malbec Tiers

26 07 2018

By Peter Vetsch

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

In some ways, trendy grapes have it tough.  Malbec has a proud and lengthy heritage as one of the six permitted grapes in red Bordeaux (yes, I’m still counting Carmenere, and shall ever continue to do so) and as the dauntingly famous Black Wine of Cahors, and it is almost single-handedly responsible for giving an entire country a vinous identity that has led to the rediscovery and cultivation of astonishingly high-altitude decades-old vineyards and a re-imagination of what grapes are capable of achieving in Argentina.  It is both an Old World stalwart and a New World trailblazer, pulling off both with equal aplomb and giving itself new life in the process.  But with raging-wildfire levels of success comes an inevitable fight against consumer boredom, particularly amongst the more avant-garde and adventurous in the wine world, which creates a sort of quiet undercurrent of peer pressure to steer clear of what is currently painfully a la mode.

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Great labels, but why is one bottle a third taller than the other??

I feel this way quite a bit, pulled away from the customer staple of the day in part because of my own desire to see what else is out there, but in part because of some innate resistance that I see amongst other wine geeks, some refusal to go along with what is everywhere.  So it was with Australian Shiraz; so it is with Argentinian Malbec; so it will be with whatever comes next.  I don’t really have a hard stance on this, but I have recently tried to make sure that my efforts at open-mindedness in wine extend equally to those grapes and styles that are suddenly ubiquitous as to those that remain esoteric.  I have also tried hard to remember that I once relied very heavily on the Shiraz-laden fads of the day as a gateway that set wine’s hooks into me for the first time, and I enjoyed the living hell out of them.  Fifteen years later, I have a WSET Advanced certification and have been publishing reviews on a wine blog for seven years.  Trends can lead somewhere.  So let’s start somewhere. Read the rest of this entry »


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Luigi Bosca: 2013 Malbec Value Tiers

1 09 2016

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

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Now THAT’S a label rebrand. Thing of beauty.

Once you dive deep into the world of wine and start devoting more time and money than most people deem sane into bottles and glasses and books and storage systems, it can be a challenge sometimes to maintain a sense of discovery about larger-production brands, the workhorse wines you see on the liquor store shelves.  In part that can be valid:  some of them aren’t very good, a fact thrown into stark relief after you’ve learned about production differences and downed a quality bottle or three.  But others have found a way to keep that quality and that sense of vinous wonder despite stepping up in scale and availability, and the best of these manage to do this at an easily accessible price.  It may be as hard to create a well-made, interesting, varietally accurate bottle of 100,000-case $20 wine as it is to create a small-production luxury showpiece bottle at $100.  I’ve been able to try a few different Luigi Bosca wines over the past couple years, and they are making the former happen on a consistent basis.

I say this a lot and apologize for repeating myself, but if you want to learn about a grape or a producer or a region, buy a representative bottle and pay careful attention as you drink it.  If you REALLY want to learn a lot MORE about that grape, producer or region, buy TWO different representative bottles, drink them side by side, and note the similarities and differences.  Comparative tasting is probably the biggest educational gift you can give yourself…plus you also get to open two bottles at once, which can never be bad.  Tonight’s comparative tasting should be particularly illustrative because so much about the two Luigi Bosca Malbecs sitting in front of me are alike:  same producer, same grape, same vintage (2013), same general region (Mendoza, Malbec capital of the New World in Argentina).  What’s different?  Price points ($18 vs. $35), site specificity (general regional wine vs. single-vineyard wine from quality subregion) and grape-growing/winemaking techniques.  What shines through – the similarities or the differences? Read the rest of this entry »


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Malbec World Day Challenge: Luigi Bosca Showdown

17 04 2015

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

Malbec World Day Challenge contenders.

Malbec World Day Challenge contenders.

Happy Malbec World Day everyone!  If you weren’t previously aware, April 17th was declared an international day of Malbec celebration by the Wines of Argentina back in 2011 in commemoration of the date back in 1853 when the Argentine government submitted a bill to the legislature for the formation of a School of Agriculture and with the objective of boosting and diversifying the country’s wine industry.  The bill quickly became law and led directly to the introduction of the Malbec grape (among other French varietals) to Argentine soils by noted agronomist Michel Aime Pouget.  The rest, as they say, was history.  You might know Argentine Malbec as something of a recent trend, but it’s been a presence in the country for longer than Canada has existed as a nation, and one of the reasons it was well-positioned to take the world by storm in the 2000s was the wealth of remarkable wine infrastructure already present in Argentina, old-vine Malbec vineyards that had been planted a century earlier.  This is actually my second recent brush with a country feting its ex-French national varietal:  I helped Chile celebrate World Carmenere Day back in November.  If any other parts of South America have grape holidays they want broadcast (International Tannat Day, Uruguay?), I’m totally there. Read the rest of this entry »


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