91 Points | International Wine Cellar , January/February 2011
($25) Bright ruby-red. Blueberry, cassis, menthol and mineral aromas lifted by spices and flowers; rather Bordeaux-like. Sexy and sweet in the middle but with firm acidity keeping the blackberry, menthol and spicy oak flavors under wraps today. This juicy, firmly built wine finishes with a serious backbone of tannins and acids. Its spine and restrained aromatics suggest holding it for two or three years of further development in bottle. An impressively energetic and classy cabernet sauvignon for this moderate price. Susana Balbo works with older vines and lower yields, preferring to use a relatively warm, extractive fermentation to make wines that will age; the wines she crafts under the BenMarco label are more user-friendly and designed for earlier consumption.
91 Points | Robert Parker's The Wine Advocate
Member Notes
11/19/2011
by Wilkes13529713
a very nice full bodied flavorful cab
Susana Balbo
06/09/2011
by LaCroix13618711
Wine was as advertised, a well structured napa style Cab.
Liked it
06/07/2011
by Arrington14069147
This wine will benefit from more time in the cellar. It is a light to medium body wine. A little thinner than I would like, but the flavors were very well integrated and tasty. This would go very well with a good pot roast. Not a "killer" cab, but a very pleasant one to drink.
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South American Wines
04/05/2012
by Walker14059340
Altho I prefer Napa wines, I don't find the correlation here. Having tasted other wines from S.America
I find they have a robust fragrance and taste similar in kind. This is a good wine but not to my palate.
For those liking Chilean wines this is a must. Altho the Malbec component is slight I find a strong
influence. Is it possible the cab grapes are different than those in California. Everytime I stray it reminds me why I love the N American coast.
About Argentina
Until the early 1990s, Argentina's wine industry was focused inward, as the local market's thirst was sufficient to absorb the huge quantities of everyday drinking wine produced there. But with per-capita consumption in the domestic market in sharp decline since the mid-1970s, Argentina's wine producers realized that they had to look to export markets to remain in business, and winemaking in Argentina began its transformation.
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Cabernet Sauvignon
Cabernet Sauvignon built its reputation on Bordeaux's Left Bank. Here, in the district of Medoc, the varietal is the key component of blended wines that also may include some Merlot and Cabernet Franc, and even Malbec and Petit Verdot. Moving slightly south, Cabernet Sauvignon meets Merlot in roughly equal proportions in the red wines of Graves. In both of these Bordeaux regions, the top bottles...
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