“Forgotten grape, unheralded country, phenomenal success”, this way Wine Spectator described the Argentina’s star grape variety. In this article, you can see the list of all the Argentine wines recommended in this edition.
In the last issue of the year, Wine Spectator published a series of articles about the Argentina’s success attained in the international markets. Among its articles, there is a list including 700 recommended wines, among them, 375 are 100% Malbec, whereas the rest are blends. In an article entitled “Malbec’s Moment”, Nathan Wesley, in charge of tasting Argentine wines for the magazine, mentioned How a forgotten red grape has revived Argentina and taken America by storm
In this article, we make reference to some of the topics highlighted by the journalist. The full article may be read in English in the link appearing at the bottom of this piece, as well as the guide of recommended wines. Besides, it is worthy to stress that the photo of this issue’s cover is a work performed by Gustavo Sabéz, a photographer from Mendoza.
“Malbec’s Moment”
An “overnight success” usually has a long back story of early promise, hard work, lucky breaks and plenty of hurdles overcome. Argentine Malbec is no exception. Today, this full-bodied red wine is an international star, but fewer than 20 years ago it was virtually ignored even in its ancestral home of France. How Malbec beat the odds is a tale of luck, talent and persistence.
Argentine wine was a blank space on the map for most Americans until recently. In the mid-1990s, wine exports from Argentina to the United States were nearly nonexistent.
But, in 2010, Argentina exported more than 4 million cases of Malbec to the United States, or 20 times the amount it sent north in 2002, representing 60 percent of its exports to the United States. The message was clear: Americans loved Malbec.
“We had a product at the right moment, in the right market and at the right price,” says vintner Santiago Achával, who founded the top-performing Achával-Ferrer winery in 1999 along with partner Manual Ferrer and Italian winemaker Roberto Cipresso.
“Malbec delivers a lot of drinking pleasure,” says Hobbs, who today is a partner in Viña Cobos in Mendoza and consults for another 14 wineries throughout Argentina.
Performance of Argentina’s exports
As Argentina’s wine export market began to surge, the country itself was in the midst of a major financial crisis. The government was heavily in debt, and the domestic economy was plagued by high unemployment and runaway inflation. To make matters worse, local wine consumption was declining as beer and soft drinks became more popular. Wineries would need to export more wine to survive.
At the end of 2001, the government defaulted on some of its debt, and by early 2002 it had finally abandoned the peso’s long-held parity peg to the U.S. dollar. The peso quickly lost three-quarters of its value, but that move swung open the door for exports. “The devaluation meant an extremely high profit for exporters,” says Nicolás Catena, whose family has been making wine in Argentina for more than a century.
It also accounted for heavy foreign investment. Anyone with dollars or euros could buy land and labor in Argentina at a 75 percent discount. A gold rush had begun, and wineries started using their newfound profits to further promote Malbec overseas. They also invested in their facilities, creating one of the most modernized wine regions in the world.
Within a few short years, Malbec was pouring into the United States at an accelerated rate, and its star was on the rise. America’s own economic downturn propelled it even further. Exports jumped by 61 percent, to more than 2 million cases, in 2008, and then to more than 3 million cases in 2009.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario