Mendoza Wines
TERRA ROSA originates in the ancient Mendoza vineyards. Patrick heads down to Argentina five times per year to oversee vineyard management and, along with co-winemaker Ray Kaufman, to control harvest and fermentation activities. After the fermentations are finished, the wine is brought up to our California winery by ship in temperature-controlled 24,000 liter containers to age in French and European oak barrels for 15 months. In short, Terra Rosa is under our direct control from vineyard through bottling. Terra Rosa Malbec is a delicious, complex, deep wine: a far more sophisticated wine than its reasonable price suggests. 5,000 cases.
VALE LA PENA, like !ZaZin, evolved out of a remarkable vineyard. As you travel south from the city of Mendoza, the elevation rises to over 1100 meters, the ground becomes littered with rocks, and vineyards give way to a desert that stretches to Patagonia. Here we grow Vale la Pena in a 100% old vine malbec vineyard that yields under one ton per acre. Vale la Pena is aged for 15 months in new French oak. It's amazingly dark, dense, fragrant, and intensely exotic. We go to a lot of work to make it, but we think you will agree that it's worth the effort, or as they say in Spanish: "vale la pena". 300 cases made annually.
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2007 Terra Rosa, Malbec, Argentina |
| Two thousand and seven marks our TENTH ANNIVERSARY in Mendoza, and what a wine to mark it with! The long and relatively cool vintage afforded us a dark black and lush, but beautifully defined and minerally, malbec. Violets, licorice, and dark berries are bright in the mouth. Terra Rosa is always both dramatic and supple, with a burst of complex and deep fruit up front and an intriguing lightness in the finish (this combination of depth and lightness is what, I think, makes malbec so attractive), and the 2007 vintage is true to form.
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2006 Tierra Divina Old Vine Malbec Valle de Uco |
| Why do so few wine labels these days reflect the origin of the wines? Maybe it's just that international-style wines have little to do with terroir. Who knows? Anyway, we are going back to our roots, and here’s the result.
Tierra Divina is an expression of the Valle de Uco: very dark; deeply fruited with ripe, dense plum and cassis fruit; complex and fragrant and exotic, with a beautiful long finish. And like the best malbecs, its power is tempered by a haunting lightness in the mouth.
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2006 Vale la Pena, Malbec, Mendoza |
| Our first vintage in Mendoza - 1998, was an unmitigated disaster. If it wasn't frost and hail, it was rain and resulting rot. Those vineyards that weren't completely destroyed never ripened adequately. The history of Mendoza is littered with such disasters, so much so that experienced growers calculate losing one vintage in five. Oddly, since 2000, while hail continues to wipe out large swathes of vineyards each year, we haven't seen the wholesale destruction of the old days. All the subsequent years have been good to excellent. More Details |
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2006 Terra Rosa, Malbec, Argentina |
| In the spring of 1998 I drove east over the Andes from Chile and drank my first Argentine malbec. I still remember it: dark and rich with a hauntingly light finish. It displayed a brisk minerality that separated it from the fruit-packed and often lush wines of California and Chile. A wild, full-bodied wine that was not tiring to drink.
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