A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [28]
Seña, a joint venture between Napa’s Robert Mondavi and Eduardo Chadwick, president of the venerable Chilean winery Errázuriz, was the first of the superpremium (i.e., fifty dollars plus) Chilean reds, and is likewise a blend of Cabernet, Merlot, and Carmenère. The New World–style 2001 vintage is the finest offspring of this marriage to date. If any Chilean winery can claim more distinguished bloodlines, it would be Almaviva, the love child of Bordeaux’s Baron Philippe de Rothschild (Mondavi’s Opus One partner) and Chile’s Concha y Toro, the first winery to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The monumental 2001 Almaviva, made by Mouton-Rothschild’s Patrick Léon with Enrique Tirado of Concha y Toro, tastes a lot like a fine Pauillac—a structured (read: slow to evolve), complex, and earthy blend of roughly 80 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 20 percent Carmenère. The grapes come from a thirty-year-old vineyard located on the outskirts of Santiago in the Maipo Valley, Chile’s traditional Cabernet region; they undergo their miraculous transubstantiation in a beautiful wooden cathedral of a winery designed by Chilean architect Martín Hurtado Covarrubias, best known for his churches.
The young prodigy among Chile’s homegrown wineries is unquestionably Montes, founded in 1988. Montes Alpha “M” is the flagship wine of the estate, a rich, powerful red made from relatively young vines planted on hillsides above the Apalta Valley in Colchagua. My pick for the most promising of Chile’s newer estates is Haras de Pirque, in the Maipo Valley, best known at present for its Thoroughbred stud farm. Founded in 1991 by entrepreneur-equestrian Eduardo Matte, Haras currently produces a Cabernet aptly named Elegance and has recently announced a joint-venture, single-vineyard wine with Italy’s Antinori family.
Most of these new-wave Chilean luxury cuvées are as yet made only in small quantities, but they are worth seeking out, and they bode well for Chile’s future as a source of premium reds. Seventy or eighty dollars may seem like a lot to pay for a Chilean wine—until you compare the best of them with similarly priced New World reds.
MALBEC RISING
I hear that South America is coming into style.
—Elvis Costello
Argentinean Malbec may not quite rank with the tango and the collected works of Jorge Luis Borges as a cultural landmark, but at this point I’d judge it a not-too-distant third—particularly when it is served alongside the fire-grilled, grass-fed beef of the pampas. To experience this combination among the svelte, stylish, late-dining patrons of La Cabaña in Buenos Aires, or better yet at an asado—a traditional outdoor barbecue—in the lean, limpid air of the high Andes, is to flirt with some kind of primordial carnivore bliss.
With its tragic, underachieving history and its malfunctioning political and economic institutions, Argentina is years behind neighboring Chile as a producer of world-class wines. But its natural endowments and its potential are probably greater. And while grape varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardon-nay thrive on the arid plateaus of the Andes’ eastern flanks, Malbec—unloved and almost forgotten in its homeland of southwestern France—seems to have found its perfect adoptive home here. Not to mention its perfect foil in Argentinean beef.
Argentina is a vegetarian’s worst nightmare. Salads can be found in the fashionable restaurants of Buenos Aires, and good French- and Italian-style pastry is widely available, but, generally speaking, beef—with a smattering of pork and lamb—is what’s for lunch and dinner. And lots of it. The fresh, grass-fed beef of the endless pampas is leaner, gamier, and chewier than the aged, corn-finished American product. For centuries, Argentines have washed it down with rustic, oxidized plonk, but in the