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Cabernet Franc: Discovering the Dark Horse of Argentine wine

by Amanda Barnes June 17, 2015

For the last month in Mendoza, I’ve only been drinking one variety. It’s abounding with rich, dark fruit, grows particularly well here and is on the lips of most winemakers. Can you guess what it is yet? No, it’s not Malbec. It is the new dark horse of the eighth wine capital… a sort of Batman wine lurking in the shadows of Malbec, but gradually taking front stage as Gotham – ahem – Mendoza city wakes up to its power. The new, handsome superhero of Mendoza’s wine scene is Cabernet Franc.

Normally tucked away in blends, Cabernet Franc has been the Mendocinean winemaker’s secret weapon for the last decade or so. Enhancing Malbec with a fresh herbaceous aroma, floral elegance and a distinctive spice, Cabernet Franc has become the clandestine amigo of premium Malbec in Mendoza. As you winery hop in Lujan and the Uco Valley in particular, once you get to the top Malbecs* or blends you’ll often find the winemaker’s eyes brighten as he delivers a barrel sample with a little wink confessing ‘we’ve added just a bit of Cabernet Franc’. As a blending partner it can deepen and bring complexity to the expression without masking its Malbec qualities. Cabernet Franc is an international comrade for red blends, but now its time has arrived to shine as the leading man.

Just a decade ago there was only one single variety Cabernet Franc made in all of Argentina, and it was like gold dust to get your hands on. These last couple of years however, have seen a real surge in single variety Cabernet Francs. Nowadays, in top restaurants and wine bars around Mendoza (and increasingly Buenos Aires) you’ll find upwards of 15 Cab Francs competing on the wine list and providing an extraordinary food partner. Production of single variety Cabernet Franc has tripled from 1.2m litres in 2006 to 3.4m litres in 2012. That is quite a jump from one lonely Cabernet Franc in 2001.

The 250% increase in plantings over the last 10 years (and 750% increase since 1990) suggests a boom, so is Cabernet Franc the next Malbec?

In short, the answer is No.

Although plantings have blossomed and word is out, 700 hectares of a variety in Argentina is a pocketful of small change (compared to 70,000 of Malbec). But more to the point, it is not Malbec. There will never be another Malbec because the Malbec boom came when land was cheap in Argentina, the Malbec was good (and cheap), Argentina was relatively undiscovered, and no-one else was producing a Malbec quite like it. Cabernet Franc on the other hand is booming in a period when the price of land in Mendoza increases by around 25% annually (you can even pick up a vineyard in Bordeaux for cheaper), good Cabernet Franc is not cheap to produce, and there are plenty of other Cabernet Francs in the metaphorical wine sea with major productions in France, USA, Italy and Canada to mention a few. Nonetheless, after the wake of Malbec, the world is now looking out for new Argentine wines and there is something undeniably special about Cabernet Franc from Mendoza.

If you’ve ever visited Mendoza, you’ll feel like you’ve walked into wine paradise – the sun dances across the sky every day, the air is pure and fresh, the nights are cool and the plants must be singing at the stunning Andes mountain views. It is the sort of place that vines from around the world would dream of moving to in their retirement. Even though Tannat softens up here to become a plump and generous variety. So Cabernet Franc – with its equal berry load, tendency to share water kindly around the plant, early ripening, and often-impeccable behaviour – thrives here. Hardy Cabernet Franc is considered an ‘insurance’ variety in other parts of the world, but Mendoza’s climate doesn’t need ‘insurance’ varieties. And it is actually the Cabernet Franc that is made to suffer on poorer soils at higher altitude with more extreme day and night temperatures, that is reaping the rich and concentrated Cabernet Franc with great character and freshness that is driving Mendoza loco.

“Cabernet Franc, when managed correctly on certain soils, has lots of personality and is very different to any other variety,” says Manuel Gonzalez, winemaker for Andeluna and previously Pulenta Estate (both renowned for the variety). “The future of Cabernet Franc in Argentina is great in terms of these high quality wines that we can reach.”

Cabernet Franc here is so good in fact that this year has seen a single variety Cabernet Franc top the Parker point charts. Bodega Aleanna’s Gran Enemigo Gualtallary Cabernet Franc was the highest scoring Argentine wine in 2014 with an impressive 97 points in Wine Advocate. That is big news in Malbec country.

It is clear that Cabernet Franc is quickly becoming the darling of Mendoza’s wine scene, but 10 years ago it wasn’t an easy sell.

It took a cheeky – and somewhat stubborn – winemaker to go against his boss’ orders in 2001 for the first commercial single variety Cabernet Franc to be born. When young winemaker Mauricio Lorca started making wine at La Celia in La Consulta, the agronomists didn’t know what to do with this Bordeaux variety that had been planted, like so many European relatives, in the 80s. Lorca decided to change the vineyard management and vinify it to see what the variety could offer.

“The wine was amazing!” recounts Lorca. “With a lot of colours, flavours and the minty, pepper characteristics of Cabernet Franc. I decided to buy some bottles and bottle it for one year.” The General Manager of the winery wasn’t as pleased about the winemaker working on this unsellable variety and told him to stop wasting money and dump it. Fortunately for La Celia, Lorca didn’t and instead kept it secretly bottled until the right person came along to taste it. That person was an importer from Switzerland who loved it so much on tasting that she wanted to buy the entire production – all 13,000 bottles. And so La Celia winery became the pioneer of single variety Cabernet Franc in Mendoza.

Soon to join the ranks of single variety Cab Franc-ophiles were key players including Pulenta Estate, Benegas Lynch, Andeluna and Catena Zapata, and the variety’s fame moved beyond Mendoza to plantings in Patagonia and even the Pampas. Pocket-sized plantations are all over the country’s vineyards, although it is Mendoza – in particular the cooler, high altitude plantings of Uco Valley and Alto Agrelo – that has given this underrated French variety a new home.

Cabernet Franc may now be flying solo into wine glasses in Mendoza, but it’s more with its partner in crime, Malbec, that it is taking front stage and showing a fabulous potential. “With these two great varieties of the world we can produce a great future for Argentine wine,” says Marcelo Pelleriti, winemaker for Monteviejo and Chateaux Le Gay in Pomerol, France, who has fallen in love with the charms of blending Cabernet Franc in both continents. “Cabernet Franc has some more floral characteristics like a Malbec, and those floral and mineral characteristics combined with Cabernet Franc’s fresh tannins work with the sweet tannins of Malbec to produce a wine that could explode our minds.” More than a great blending grape, Marcelo (like many here) believes Malbec and Cabernet Franc are kindred spirits in Mendoza – both excelling on certain soils – and he co-ferments them in barrels together for what he views as the future taste of not just Mendocinean Malbec, but Mendoza. Cabernet Franc is indeed becoming part of the taste and terroir of Mendoza.

Despite its recent boom, in my opinion Cabernet Franc will still play Batman to Argentina’s Superman: Malbec. They can however fight wine crime together saving the world from bad wines, and Malbec’s red cape will continue to orbit the globe at greater speed. Every once in a while though, Argentine Cabernet Franc will light up the night sky, and drinkers will see the masked hero once again.

When you next peer down into your glass of Mendoza red, give it a swirl and inhale deeply to see if you can spot the black-caped superhero lingering in the shadows. Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it Superman? No, it’s Cabernet Franc.

*Single variety wines can carry up to 15% other varieties according to Argentine legislation.

Want to know which Cabernet Francs we recommend? Take a look at our top wine varieties for Argentina.

June 17, 2015 0 comment

Chile Features Argentina Features By Region Features Wine

The Riddler, Robot & The Monk: How to make Sparkling Wine

by Amanda Barnes June 15, 2015

written by Amanda Barnes

Have you ever wondered how bubbly gets, well, bubbly? Amanda Barnes takes us through the snap, crackle and pop of sparkling wine and meets a riddler, a monk and a robot along the way.

Popping corks and letting foamy Champagne bubble over glass tops (or necking the premature fizz quickly from the excited bottle top) is a quintessential part of a good party. Sparkling wine is fun, frothy and doesn’t it make you feel fabulous?

No one can resist a bit of bubbly, even those extraterrestrials that don’t drink wine will down a glass of Champagne when the occasion calls. Aside from the hiccups and an instant blood transfusion of happiness, there is a lot more to sparkling wine than meets the blurry eye. Getting the bubbles into the wine is an art form that has taken centuries to master.

How do you get bubbles in the bubbly?

As a modern drinker that has grown up in the age of soda stream and panda pop, the most obvious way to make something sparkle would be by carbonating it. It doesn’t take a miracle to turn the sparkle in water to sparkle in wine, and that is how it happens in the cheapest fizzy plonk.

If you imagine the lowest shelf on the supermarket, the one that beggar’s belief at only five dollars – this is the sort of wine that has had carbon (CO2) injected into it. This would be your Baywatch equivalent: fun, bubbly, cheap entertainment that has been artificially inflated.

On the other end of the spectrum we get the most revered and the oldest method for sparkling wine: the traditional ‘champenoise’ method. The most expensive, the longest lasting and the one that was, like many good things in life, discovered completely by accident.

The legend goes that in 1697 an old monk was busy in his monastery attending to his fine bottles of monk-made wine and swigging a few along the way (monks may lead a solitary life, but it was certainly a merry one!) The monk opened one of his bottles, and to his amazement it came out fizzy! He drank the miraculous nectar and allegedly cried out to his monastery colleagues ‘Come quick, I am drinking stars!’ And so the fairytale of the discovery of Champagne began.

The science behind the discovery is that when active yeast is left in a wine bottle with sugar it produces CO2 (aka. lovely bubbly). The simple chemical reaction is sugar + yeast = alcohol + CO2. It is the same process you use for making still wine, although when done in a closed environment (like a bottle) all the CO2 gas is captured.

The trapped CO2 bubbles can be released in a delightful pop of a cork, a sizzle in the glass and a fizzle on the tongue. Or they can be released when the pressure becomes too much, and the bottle – or top – explodes. This simple bubble science is how Formula One winners have so much post-race fun.

The truth behind the star-studded story of the monk’s discovery is actually that he was hopping mad with all these exploding bottles in his cellar, ruining his wine and destroying the peace of the monastery. The fact that this monk’s name was Dom Perignon made this slightly problematic for a certain Champagne brand later down the line… After the work of a talented spin-doctor in the 19th century, the truth got a bit of fairy dust and became all about sparkle and enchanted discovery. Dom Perignon was now the pioneer and poster boy of Champagne and the multi-billion dollar Champagne industry was born.

The fact that the English had been making sparkling wine since 1662 (some 30 years before Dom P got frustrated with his popping bottles) still remains a thorn in the side for the French legend, completely au contraire to the story Champagne houses like to give you. Even other parts of France (outside the Champagne boundary) will negate the famed region’s claim to the discovery. Carcassonne in Southern France proclaim that they were the very first to discover sparkling wine in the 1530s, over a century before the English. All these claims to the invention of bubbly are rather comme ci comme ça. The important bit is that this was the first method for sparkling wine and is still being made today, in a very traditional and pain staking process.

The champenoise method, with the second fermentation in the bottle, requires a lot of manual labour and at least a few months in the winery (or sometimes over 5 years) to make it. This is where the role of The Riddler comes in. One of the most under-appreciated figures in sparkling history, the riddler is the person that has to spend months in a dank, cold cellar turning each bottle 90 degrees once a day to steadily collect and settle the dead yeast at the bottom of the bottle to be later popped out.

The riddler – as if he wasn’t lacking acknowledgement enough – has been replaced to some extent by machine now, but many producers prefer the hand-turned technique and machines are often more expensive than hiring a person.

All the attention to meticulous details is why ‘champenoise’ is the most expensive method, but also renowned as the best for its fine bubbles and special tertiary aromas like baked bread, brioche, truffle and hazelnuts. This is the James Bond of sparkling wine.

Somewhere in-between champenoise and carbonation are the tank (charmat) method and transfer method: modern ways of getting a traditional-style second fermentation in greater quantity, with less hard work. Let’s call them Robocop 1 & 2.

The tank method (aka charmat) is – as expected from the name – where the second fermentation is not done in a bottle, but rather in a pressurized tank. This is the method for many mid-priced sparkling and fruity wines like Prosecco and Lambrusco in Italy.

Finally, the transfer method involves making a sparkling wine in the bottle the traditional way, then transferring it into a tank and re-bottling it. This method seems like a lot of work… and it is! But the advantages are making a more consistent wine (without variation between bottles) and giving the complexity of a traditional champenoise method wine that has benefited from lees aging.

Once the bubbles are created though, the work isn’t done. You need to add a dosage (a sugar mixture) to sweeten it to your final taste. All of this meddling must to be taken into mind by the winemaker from the beginning, as he has to make the base wine in the first place imagining what it will taste like after second fermentation and the added dosage. Another superhero of the sparkling wine world.

Making fizz is not as easy as it first seems. So while popping a cork on a bottle of bubbly is fantastically simple, next time you are spritzing it in the air and all over the frenzied crowd (or disdainful girlfriend) remember all the people, history and effort that goes into that lovely jubbly bottle of bubbly.

June 15, 2015 0 comment

News Mendoza By Region Argentina Features Wine

Bodega Casarena launches The Icon

by Rachel Davies June 14, 2015

written by Rachel Davies

It took 4 years in production, but Bodega Casarena has finally launched their new top level wine: The Icon. A blend of their two top single varieties DNA Malbec and DNA Cabernet Sauvignon, the Icon is a rich new addition to the winery’s bursting portfolio, including their recently premiered Single Vineyards collection.

Each Single Vineyards wine is named after the owner’s grandchildren, Jamila’s Malbec, Lauren’s Malbec, Lauren’s Cabernet Franc, and Owen’s Cabernet Sauvignon, to name a few. The philosophy behind their Single Vineyards line is to show the impact the soil has on the resulting wine. Jamila and Lauren’s vineyard are in Lujan de Cuyo and only 5 kilometers apart, but the soil changes notably – and so does the flavour. Jamila’s Malbec comes from rocky limestone and shallow soil giving the wine a fresh taste with mineral and red fruit notes. Lauren’s Malbec comes from clay soil with stones creating black fruit flavors, more intense than the lighter Jamila’s Malbec.

Bodega Casarena was built in 1937 and is co-owned by a North American and an Argentine family who have developed five different lines of wine. Take your pick of which to sip as you sprawl out on the comfy lounge chairs on the outdoor patio at this winery in Lujan de Cuyo, Mendoza.

June 14, 2015 0 comment

Argentina Wine Guide By Region Argentina Features Features Wine

Wine varieties to try in Argentina

by Amanda Barnes June 6, 2015

written by Amanda Barnes

Argentina is not just Malbec… there are a handful of interesting wine varieties to try and you’ll be surprised with all that is on offer in the white, red, pink and sparkling sectors. Here is a rundown of the best wine varieties to try in Argentina.

Cabernet Franc

This has been the ‘new’ variety for quite some time now. It’s not new anymore… but it has proved it was worth the hype. Cabernet Franc is producing some of the most exciting wines at the moment that are garnering some of the highest attention. Intense, spicy and so very different to other Cabernet Francs in the world. This is not a cheap wine to produce and the best tend to come with rather steep price tags. One to splash out on.

Chardonnay

There are some firm believers that Argentina can produce great Chardonnays, and there are some doubters too. My recommendation is try from the top and you certainly won’t be disappointed. The bottles recommended below all dedicate a lot of time and love to maintaining the bright fruit of Chardonnay with a flinty mineral characteristic and a smooth and seductive nuance of barrel aging. Serious Chardonnays are the way to go in Argentina, and best to pick from the tippy top heights of the Uco Valley.

Petit Verdot

Mendoza’s odd ball in the family. Traditionally just used as a very small part of the classic Bordeaux blend, like Malbec and Cabernet Franc it has found its own solo identity in Mendoza being used as a single variety wine. Petit Verdot though is a little like marmite – some hate it, some love it. Dare you to try and see which camp you fall on.

Recommended: Decero, Ruca Malen, Vistalba (Tomero), Bodega Chaman.

Torrontes

The undisputed Queen of Argentine wine: Torrontes is pretty, floral, exuberant and memorable. Easy to drink and even better to party with. It typically comes from the lofty heights of Cafayate in Salta, northern Argentina, but you can also find good Torrontes in La Rioja, San Juan and Mendoza. We’ve seen all sorts of trends of Torrontes come and go, but this wine is best when made how nature intended: a lady’s wine. A machista wouldn’t be far from the truth when describing her beautiful first impression, but when you get down to it, she is quite simple.

Cabernet Sauvignon

This classic variety has a long history battling with Malbec as the most esteemed wine in the country. Let’s be honest, it lost. However there are many advocates of Cab still working hard to prove to the world that Argentina can be one of the finest producers of this, the most popular red variety worldwide.

Recommended: Cobos, Catena Zapata, Clos de Chacras, Kaiken.

Semillon

At one stage, this was the most planted white variety in Argentina. While stocks may be dwindling, it is still prominent in white table wine and is a rather overlooked variety. A couple winemakers though have started paying more serious attention to the neglected variety and are making some great examples that tell a story of Argentina’s past and perhaps hint towards the future.

Recommended: Mendel, Nieto Senetiner (DOC), Passionate Wines.

Bonarda

Another of Argentina’s most widely planted grapes, Bonarda has been the workhorse of Argentine reds for as long as most vines remember. It is used widely in blends and table wines, but it also makes an incredibly approachable and enjoyable single red: fruit forward, lush and easy drinking.

Recommended: Cara Sur, Passionate Wine, Caligliori, El Enemigo, Zuccardi, Mairena, Altos Las Hormigas.

Pinot Noir

A notoriously tricky variety to grow, Pinot Noir is sublime when it is done well and disappointing when it is not. Expect to pay some top dollar for the good ones. The most renowned region for Argentine Pinot is Patagonia, although Gualtallary in the Uco Valley is catching up making some excellent value and distinct Pinot Noir.

Recommended: Patagonia – Bodega Chacra, Humberto Canale. Mendoza – Zorzal.

Malbec

Malbec was probably already on your bucket list and it deserves to stay there – the undoubted ruler of Argentine wine. Whether you prefer a light, fruity and uncomplicated Malbec, a dense, jammy and complex Malbec or a smooth, dark and elegant Malbec, it’s all here! It would be impossible to tell you the best Malbec, but here are some of the top producers that are personal faves and show a great variety for Argentina’s flagship.

June 6, 2015 0 comment

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