Antiyal

More pictures coming soon!

This harvest we are going to provide a running account of things happening in the bodega with a “closer to us” feel with little budget for ‘production’. Comments are welcome; do enjoy.

Recent tasting notes: Josh Raynolds
Kuyen – Maipo Valley 2006

($30; 66% syrah and 17% each of cabernet sauvignon and carmenere) Ruby-red. Strong floral and red berry aromas are complemented by cracked pepper and baking spices. Sappy raspberry and blackberry flavors are given spine by tangy acidity and firmed by dusty tannins. Fresh, elegant and precise, with very good finishing clarity and lingering spiciness. Already delicious but balanced to age; I’d hold onto this wine for a few more years.  - 90 points

Antiyal – Maipo Valley 2006

($55; 44% carmenere, 34% cabernet sauvignon and 22% syrah) Ruby with a bright rim. Fresh red berries, flowers and smoky minerals on the nose, with a suave undercurrent of Asian spices. Lively, finely etched raspberry, redcurrant and cherry flavors possess impressive depth but are also quite lithe, with silky tannins adding support. Gains weight and sweetness on the finish, which features notes of black raspberry and floral pastille. This is delicious right now but balanced to reward at least another five years of patience. (Global Vineyard Importers, Berkeley, CA)  - 92 points

Richard Nalley 10.09.08 | Forbes October 27, 2008
New data can be pretty inconvenient when you’ve already made up your mind. In the case of the opinion-altering South American wines now landing in the U.S., though, we may as well sit back and enjoy bringing our thinking up to date.

The ocean of OK-for-the-price Chilean and Argentine (and Uruguayan and Brazilian) imports has always tossed ashore a few scattered pearls, but never a range of head turners like the top wines we are seeing now. Some are even overpriced–that’s progress!–and a few are downright giddy with it. These wineries know they can change your mind. Now they are daring you to pull out your wallet and see for yourself.
In Depth: 20 Exceptional South American Wines

Antiyal 2005 (Chile, $55) A “natural wine” icon. Smoky, intense and layered with flavor, this is a compelling blend of carménère and cabernet with a lick of syrah. Small production and bio-dynamically farmed and produced; Alvaro and Marina Espinosa grow some of the grapes in their own front yard.

Argentina and Chile have long been on the wrong side of what a winemaker friend likes to call the Law of the Exception. The idea is that if an overlooked winery, region, or grape variety can produce one phenomenal wine, then the question becomes ‘”Why not do it all the time?”

With Chile and Argentina, the possibility for exceptions was pretty obvious. Both countries have big-league wine industries (Argentina’s is the world’s fifth-largest), nearly 500 years of vintages and growing areas with Eden-like climates for farming wine grapes–so warm and dry that grapes easily ripen and pesticides, fungicides and anti-rot measures are often unnecessary. Around here, much of what is painstakingly “organic” practice in wetter climates is second nature, as it were.

Of course, if warm, dry weather were all there was to making great wine, the Sahara Desert would be Châteauneuf-du-Pape. But South America’s main wine-producing regions offer a couple of crucial advantages.

Great Grapes
One is water. Snowmelt from the Andes Mountains provides all the grapes need for irrigation. The other is cool temperatures morning and night. On the Chilean–Pacific–side of the Andes, that’s courtesy of the ocean and the cold Humboldt Current. It keeps the grapes’ natural acidity from respiring out before the grape fully ripens, which means that rich, mature fruit doesn’t yield flabby, jam-like wine.

The trend among top wineries in Chile today is to explore ever cooler, more ocean-influenced pockets in growing areas like Casablanca, Leyda and Limari up north and Bío Bío in the south for grapes such as pinot noir that love lower temperatures.

On the Argentine side of the mountain range, the evening chill-out comes from getting high. Very high. Argentina is the world leader in sky-scraping vineyards–the average vineyard there is planted at 900 meters (about 2,950 feet). That’s remarkable considering that “mountain grapes” in the U.S., such as those from Ridge Vineyards’ famous Monte Bello vineyard, grow at, say, 1,300 to 2,600 feet.

And these days, Argentine wineries with a taste for risk seem to be engaged in a game of chicken: You’re going to try to ripen grapes (and dodge hail) at that crazy altitude? Well, watch this: We’re taking it up another 500 feet.

Several wineries feature their altitude level on their labels along with their alcohol level. These include Bodega Catena Zapata 2006 Malbec and Trapiche 2005 Malbec, Vina Eleodoro Aciar. The current cutting edge is a near-preposterous 9,849 feet at Bodega Colomé’s Altura Maxima vineyard, owned by Swiss entrepreneur Donald Hess, who also owns Napa Valley’s Hess Collection.

The flip side of South America’s gifts from nature is human nature. With harvesting healthy grapes so easy, the urge to push things–to challenge your vineyard workers, your winemaker, shareholders, accountants and customers–hardly seemed necessary to many of the big wineries that dominate the scene in both countries (particularly in Chile). All too often in South America, the good has pushed out the great.

In Chile, the blame falls on its heavily export-oriented market, which traditionally competed based on price, and in Argentina on its huge domestic market, whose public didn’t demand better.

“When I began making wine here in 1989,” says well-known California-based winemaker and consultant Paul Hobbs, “nearly all the wines were oxidized, tired and brown. Argentines thought that’s what good wine meant.”

The ambitious wines we are drinking today didn’t come from nowhere, of course. Says Chilean winemaker Alvaro Espinosa (Antiyal, Emiliana), “We have seen a huge improvement even in the past three years, but the quality arriving now is not from the work of three years but from what we have done in the past 15 years.”

The stones were set rolling by such quality pioneers as Nicolás Catena in Argentina and Aurelio Montes in Chile; by Espinosa, Chile’s first “garage winemaker”; by international consultants like Hobbs and France’s ubiquitous Michel Rolland; and by high-profile foreign joint ventures like Almaviva between Mouton-Rothschild and Chile’s Concha y Toro. Those stones have gathered into, well, maybe not a full-scale avalanche but an avalanche-ette.

Name That Tune
The current success also ties in to the question of identity: South American wine needed one. If you are peddling yet another chardonnay or cabernet in the overcrowded global wine marketplace and don’t have a familiar brand name, or you come from, say, Bordeaux or Napa, it is very tempting, maybe even a matter of survival, to keep your prices low.

But the visionary winemakers decided it was better to gain recognition through bottling something distinctive, or at least marketable, as your own–think what “shiraz” has done for Australia. We are now getting used to seeing wines like carménère from Chile, malbec (and torrontés and bonarda) from Argentina, and even–keep an eye peeled–tannat from Uruguay.

There are two surprising things about these grapes. One is that they are vinous refugees, mostly discounted or no longer planted in their home countries. Except in specialized local pockets, “carménère, malbec and tannat” makes a good response to “Name three of the least-loved traditional grapes of southwestern France.”

The other surprise, given the emphasis these countries place on their signature grapes, is how recently anybody there came to give a hoot about them. Chile may be the only country in the world to produce fine, smoky, spicy reds from carménère, but up until 1994, no one in Chile even knew it existed there. What we now recognize as carménère was thought to be a particularly irritating type of merlot, one that never ripened as early as the “good” merlot.

Turns out that if you don’t treat it like merlot–if you pull more leaves to get sun on the clusters, let the grapes hang for a few extra weeks– mira! You get carménère just like we like it. Plus, the red leaves are stunning in the fall.

Malbec, a minor Bordeaux blending grape, was once best known, if it was known at all, for making France’s Cahors wines. It is lucky to have survived in Argentina. As recently as the 1980s, it was being ripped out by the tens of thousands of acres to make room for more fashionable grapes, such as chardonnay. In Argentina, malbec’s gift is that it readily makes a likable $10 wine but can also make luscious, exuberant, distinctive wines, usually in blends, when given the royal treatment.

As for the tannat grape, which Uruguayan vintners would dearly love to market as a malbec-like local phenomenon, it is a problem child supreme. Three times more tannic than cabernet sauvignon (its name even derives from the word “tannin”), tannat, when poorly handled, makes a wine that will take your tonsils down with it. The suave texture of the best tannats from Uruguay shows that the Law of the Exception is alive and flourishing there too.

In fact, as a tasting of the life-enhancing imports now arriving from the top vineyard regions of South America proves, the exceptions are starting to rule.

Chilean red blends
Whether a mix of grapes, vineyards, vintages or regions, blending is a staple of Chile’s wine industry – and key to its consumer appeal, says PETER RICHARDS

Four Star Wines highly recommended

ANTIYAL, MAIPO VALLEY 2004
(16.6pts/20)
‘Opulent aroma of cassis, coffee, dark chocolate and spices. Austere minty notes with firm tannins. Well balanced and delicious. From 2008.’ (LW)

Kuyen, Maipo Valley 2005
(15.6pts/20)
‘Full and rich. Raspberry, bacon fat and spice on nose and palate. Long, ripe finish. From 2008.’ (KL)

Although many people would not immediately associate Chile with blended reds, it is undoubtedly one of the country’s strongest and most historic wine styles. Continue reading

This week’s WOW
2003 Kuyen, Alvaro Espinoza, Maipo, Chile (£8.99)
You may have heard of Antiyal (£19.99, Adnams). it is my favourite Chilean red and it is certainly one of the most serious reds in the world. The 2003 is due here very soon, so form an orderly queue, but in the meantime – and for less than half the price – you can snap up the ‘second’ wine from the Kuyen estate. My wine of the week is a wondrous creation, which needs to be decanted and left for half-an-hour before you attack. When you do, you will find yourself in a whirlwind of red and blackberry fruit, with oak, leather and spice also in the vortex. This is the definitive autumn wine, so get in quick.

The Mail, September 2006
Matthew Jukes