Vintner Select Portfolio: Argentina

Argentina is the fifth largest wine producing country in the world, yet largely unknown to wine connoisseurs. We source our Argentinean wines from an international pool of winemaking talents who have been drawn to the Mendoza region by its exceptional luminosity; its dry, low-nutrient high-mineral soil; its salutary swings of day- and night-time temperatures; and its high elevation at the foot of the Andes. Above all, we and our Mendozan winemaking collaborators from Argentina, Italy, and the United States are thrilled by the potential of old, ungrafted malbec vines.

FLAVORFUL INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATIONS

The celebrated California winemaker Paul Hobbs started consulting in Argentina in 1989 and began to make his own wines in 1998. His commitment is to use the same philosophy and winemaking methods he has successfully employed in California. Viña Cobos emerges from Paul's collaboration with husband and wife Argentine growers Andrea Marchiori and Luis Barraud. The Hobbs family of Mendozan wines encompasses not only the grand vin Cobos, but also Bramare - which originates in another section of the same old vineyard, and a line of malbec, Cabernet, and Merlot known as "Nativos."

Patrick Campbell, another celebrated California winemaker (Laurel Glen) created his Terra Rosa brand to acquire high quality, low-priced South American Cabernet Sauvignon. After nearly a decade of cultivating relationships with growers in Chile and Argentina, Patrick became convinced that the prime potential for superb wine values lay in purchasing his own vineyards in Mendoza and concentrating on malbec. He sees this project as strikingly parallel with his stewardship of old vines in California for his "Reds" and "ZaZin" brands. "While Italian immigrants were planting out zinfandel to their Lodi vineyards in the late 1800s, "says Patrick"a second wave of pioneers from Italy was laying out malbec vineyards in the gravelly, rocky soils at the base of the mighty Andes in Mendoza. They engineered the complex system of canals that even today direct snow melt to the sparse soils. Hundreds of hectares of close-planted, high altitude, and decades-old malbec vineyards yield small tonnages of intensely flavored and exotically perfumed wines"

In 1995, a team of Italian wine professionals began a project called Altos Las Hormigas to produce wines that express fully the unique dynamics of the malbec grape in the terroirs of Mendoza . Alberto Antonini, a well known Tuscan wine maker, and Antonio Morescalchi were joined by world renowned oenologist Attilio Pagli, "super broker" Marco de Grazia, management counselor Alan Scerbanenko last, but not least, by Antonio Terni. Terni, an Italo-Argentine, is known for his top quality wines in the Marche region of Italy, as well as his boundless enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, all things related to South American viticulture and the music of Bob Dylan! Native Mendozan Carlos Vazquez, long-time vineyard manager for Cataña (Mendoza's best-known wine estate, for whom Paul Hobbs was once winemaker), was later persuaded to join the otherwise Italianate cast of Altos las Hormigas.In addition to their malbec and malbec riserva, the team recently began producing a wine from the infectious and little known grape Bonarda.