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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Categories : Wine Reviews

Malbec Maelstrom, Part I: Malbec World Day

15 04 2021

By Peter Vetsch

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes]

When somebody sends you 14 bottles of Argentinian wine and instructs you to celebrate Malbec World Day, you pop some corks and celebrate the damn day. This global vinous event, which falls on April 17th (this Saturday), was created by the Wines of Argentina to showcase the country’s signature grape and celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2021. For the first nine of those years, I wrongly thought it was called “World Malbec Day” and I’m still struggling to recalibrate. April 17th was the date the first agricultural school was founded in Argentina back in 1853, the year that Malbec first hit South American shores. Nearly 150 years later, steeped in local history and tradition, it became a sudden massive worldwide hit. Alongside Australian Shiraz, Argentina’s own ex-French showcase export rose from international obscurity to overwhelming commercial renown thanks to its combination of bold, accessible fruity flavours and equally accessible price tags. Argentina exported 128 million litres of Malbec last year, maintaining its status as a world phenomenon.

Note to self: Malbec World Day, NOT World Malbec Day.

Like I did with Shiraz before it, I wonder about Argentinian Malbec’s next act. Its rise has been meteoric, but nothing sustains momentum like this forever, and when the next affordable and approachable varietal trend hits and the spotlight dims slightly, Malbec will have a choice to make. It has captured popular acclaim and is yanked off the retail shelf more quickly than most of its competitors. What does it want to be next? Certain shining examples are testing the limits of quality and identity in Argentina; is that the play, exploring the intricacies of the thrillingly unique altitude-induced mountain climates of Mendoza, or is slaking the thirst of the world at an affordable price a sufficient goal? As a wine-growing region, Argentina has a series of thrilling advantages, from massive diurnal shifts to easy access to extraordinarily old vines; in a world that is constantly seeking out extreme viticulture, for climatic or more adventurous reasons, the country’s entire growing area screams it. What’s it going to do with it? Let’s raise seven glasses of Malbec as we wait to find out, and Ray will bring us home later in the week with another seven.

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Categories : Calgary Wine Life, Wine Reviews

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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The Patient Vintner: Bodega y Cavas de Weinert

24 05 2019

By Peter Vetsch

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

If I was to tell you that I was drinking the current release of a mid-tier offering from a well-regarded producer and from a name region, made from 70-110 year-old vines, and that the vintage date on the bottle was 2006, what would you guess the region was?  Rioja – maybe a Reserva offering from a traditional-minded producer?  Champagne, if you are extremely liberal with your definition of “mid-tier”?  Somewhere in Italy?  Portugal?  You would probably be most of the way through the global wine region Rolodex before you landed on Mendoza, Argentina, and once you did, you would probably immediately discard the possibility, knowing this to be the heart of bold, fruity, approachable Malbecs that are released and enjoyed in their youth.  Bodega y Cavas de Weinert, and its current-inventory $25 old-vine 2006 Malbec, will cause you to re-evaluate all of your presumptions; they are an anachronism in all the best ways.

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This classical estate actually has a rather recent history:  the winery dates back to 1890, but its current identity was tied to its acquisition by Brazilian Bernardo Weinert in 1975. Swiss winemaker Hubert Webber has been at the helm since 1996, when he was ensconced at the ripe old age of 27; his mission has been to craft wines from Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot wines that avoid early showmanship and start to reveal themselves after a decade or more, as it is only then that the Bodega will release them to market.  Lengthy barrel aging (up to 5-6 years in large oak foudres in Weinert’s cool granite cellars), then further time in bottle pre-release, is the estate’s hallmark — Weinert follows the old-school Spanish model of only allowing his wines into the public sphere when they are deemed ready to drink, whether or not this follows the standard chronological vintage release playbook.  In other words, don’t necessarily assume that the 2007 will follow the 2006 as the next wine on the shelf.

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The relatively modest prices of the finished wines might be reflective of advantageous land and labour costs in Argentina, but they are not the result of any lack of care in the vineyard:  Weinert’s vineyards, located in Mendoza’s top subregion of Lujan de Cuyo, feature largely ungrafted own-rooted vines that are a minimum of 25 years old and are exclusively hand-harvested.  Fermentation takes place in cement tanks, and Weinert’s cellar boasts both the largest barrel in Argentina (44,000 L) and the oldest barrel in the world, each of which are a reminder that the goal of the Weinert wines’ extended time in barrel is not wood flavour transference (which increases the newer and smaller the barrel is), but gentle, lightly oxidative maturation.  I had the opportunity to taste a trio of Weinert offerings, all 12-13 years old (as is par for the course in this particular corner of Mendoza), to explore this wholly unique take on Argentinian viniculture.  Malbec first, as always. 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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Calgary Wine Life: Catena Virtual Tasting with Laura Catena

26 08 2017

Laura Catena is my wine hero.  Her list of credentials reads as if it must have been accomplished by at least two people over the course of long, full lives:  fourth-generation winery owner, global Argentinian wine ambassador, Harvard magna cum laude, Stanford medical school grad, San Francisco emergency room and pediatric emergency doctor, multilingual published author, viticultural researcher and innovator.  And these parallel tracks of success are not a story of a mid-life career switch; she has been excelling in one of the most challenging careers in medicine and continuing her family’s proud wine legacy simultaneously, on two different continents, since she was in her early 20s.  As I have a hard time juggling more normal professional work demands and writing a weekly wine blog in the same city, I hold Dr. Catena in some degree of awe, as an example of what purpose and passion truly can accomplish in a single lifespan.

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Argentina has long been highly ranked on global lists of national wine consumption, made up as it is of a high percentage of European immigrants and their descendants, who brought with them an imbued wine culture and the know-how to introduce vines and winemaking practices to their new home.  One such voyager was Nicola Catena, Laura’s great-grandfather, who came to Argentina from Italy in 1902, at age 18, and planted his first vineyard, which became the origin of Bodega Catena Zapata.  However, it was Laura’s father Nicolas, two generations later, who brought the winery to the world’s attention and ended up bringing the whole country along with him.

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Nicolas travelled to California in the 1980s, shortly after the Judgment of Paris tasting in 1976, where Napa Valley Cabernet and Chardonnay were first thrust into the global spotlight after besting top Bordeaux and Burgundies in a surprising blind tasting that went viral.  He met up with Robert Mondavi, perhaps the man most insatiably driven to keep California’s star burning ever more brightly, and was inspired by the quality and ambition in this burgeoning rogue wine nation.  Convinced that Argentina could follow the same path to prominence and be the equal of California (not to mention France) in quality, Nicolas Catena returned home, sold the domestic-consumption table wine portion of the family winery, and zeroed in his focus on quality wines for export, aiming to “put Argentina on the map as a grand cru” for world wine.  He spent years studying climate patterns and geology and gradually came to realize that the most popular vineyard areas in Argentina at the time were mostly too warm for quality wine production.  He had two choices for cooler planting zones:  south, away from the Equator, or up, into the Andes.  He went up, and Argentina’s wine fates rose with him. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Calgary Wine Life, Wine Reviews

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 »


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Categories : Wine Reviews

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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Side By Side: 2012 Tinto Negro Malbec x2

7 10 2015

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

Malbec vs. Malbec. Mendoza Civil War.

Malbec vs. Malbec. Mendoza Civil War.

Forgive me if you’ve heard me say this before, but:  comparative tastings are the best.  You can learn a lot about wine by taking your time over a single bottle, properly assessing what’s inside and picking out colour and smell and flavour notes common to a country, region or grape.  You can learn way more about wine by doing this to two similar bottles at the same time, with almost the same characteristics, but for a single isolated variable:  same wine, different vintage; same producer, different grape; same grape, different country.  You pick up a whole bunch of what makes them the same, but you can also focus on the impact that primary thing that makes them different and see firsthand the tremendous effect that every single input going into a wine has on the finished product.  You learn from both the commonalities and the distinctions.  Plus you end up with two open bottles of wine, which generally always leads to a good night.

In this case, the similarities are massive and the differences apparently slight, but the impact remains noteworthy.  These two bottles are from the same producer (Tinto Negro, founded by the ex-vineyard manager and wine education director of renowned Argentinian winery Bodega Catena Zapata), the same country (Argentina), the same grape (Malbec), the same vintage (2012) and even the same region (Mendoza, Malbec’s New World spiritual home nestled in the foothills of the Andes).  However, the first bottle, the 2012 Tinto Negro Mendoza Malbec, is an entry-level regional bottling, and the second bottle, the 2012 Tinto Negro Uco Valley Malbec, is from the next quality tier up, a sub-regional bottling from the Uco Valley sub-zone in southwestern Mendoza.  Apart from their divergent price points, you might have a hard time differentiating them in the store, but does this little sourcing difference make a difference?  When you taste them side by side, oh yes. Read the rest of this entry »


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Argentine Value Challenge: Punto Final

4 10 2014

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

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Look closely: Spanish tasting notes!

There’s a lingering question out there that will go a long way in determining the ultimate path of the nascent Argentinian wine industry:  what to go along with Malbec?  That particular Bordeaux transplant has become a global phenomenon up in the foothills of the Andes and the undisputed star of Argentina’s vinous revolution, but there are a number of grapes currently vying for the role of its trusty national sidekick.  For a while it seemed like there was a strong marketing push to obtain Malbec-like acceptance of Argentina’s most unique white, Torrontes; I recently read a Decanter tasting panel that argued forcefully that the country’s recent forays into Cabernet Franc were an absolute revelation and that this underappreciated varietal should assume the silver medal position among Argentinian producers, although the less exciting Bonarda currently occupies that slot in terms of vineyard acres planted.  And of course, there’s always Cabernet Sauvignon, the international behemoth, promising instant recognition and easy sales for anywhere warm enough for it to grow.  In my experience, if an Argentine wine is on the shelves here and it isn’t Malbec, it’s usually Cab.  And while the wine geek in me would love to see Franc seize the day, the realist in me knows that Sauvignon will be pretty tough to displace. Read the rest of this entry »


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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.

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