2015 Antucura Cabernet Sauvignon Vista Flores Mendoza 750 ml

Most Complete Cabernet We’ve Tasted from Antucura’s Symphony of Soils

Argentina’s Mendoza wine region, especially the Uco Valley in the foothills of the Andes Mountains, produces wines that tend toward the bombastic, with very high pH and often clocking in at 15% alcohol. To call them intense would be an understatement. They’re wines known for their juicy and open-knit personality.

As Hervé Chagneau, the Bordeaux-émigré winemaker at the “little jewel” of the Uco Valley, Antucura, got more experience and more vintages under his belt, he pivoted. Forsaking the “ripeness above all” dogma, Chagneau started to focus on more on the individual terroirs of Antucura’s 130-acre estate. No wonder; there’s so much to work with.

Antucura’s vineyards in the Vista Flores region of the Uco Valley of Mendoza are planted on a narrow swath of land perched 3,500 feet above sea level. As we learned on our first trip in 2012, the lower part of the vineyard is sandy. As you climb, the sand is mixed with clay. At the very top of the slope, the soils are gravelly, Hervé Chagneau suggests, “not unlike Bordeaux’s Graves.”

Chagneau divided his 2015 harvest into dozens of small blocks, some from sandy soil, some clayey, some gravelly. Conducting individual micro-vinifications — a strategy he had employed as winemaker at La Croix de Gay — Hervé devoted a full month to experimenting with assemblages. He finished with a careful mix of approximately 50% gravel soils, 20% sandy soil, and 30% clay soil. This symphony of soil types give the wine complexity and layers that make each sip a unique experience. The gravel soils give structure and backbone, the sand gives aromatics, and the clay gives round and juicy fruit.

The 2015 growing season was a classic in Mendoza, the second consecutive cool vintage. Steve Tanzer, the top authority on all things Argentina, wrote a 2,000-word piece in the March 2016 issue of Vinous about how we are now in the “Cool Years” of the wines of Argentina and “the result has been a greater number of outstanding bottlings than ever before.”

The spring of 2015 was generally wet, and vineyards on the valley floor had a big problem with rot. Luckily, Antucura’s high-altitude Vista Flores vineyards were able to quickly bounce back from the rain. The elevation also allows for diurnal temperature fluctuation, which made for a small-berry crop of high skin-to-juice ratio. The grapes were picked at their peak of phenolic ripeness with normal sugar levels. After a double sorting of grapes, fermentation began in stainless steel at a lower temperature to preserve the fruit flavors and then transferred to second-fill French Oak barrels for 8-10 months. All this effort resulted in the most complete Antucura Cabernet that we’ve ever tasted.

The 2015 Antucura is a sign post, ushering in the cool vintages of the mid-decade. It’s more red-fruited than previous vintages with a bright, dark red color. Aromas of blackberry, licorice, and mountain blueberry, tinged with new-wood cedar on the nose. Rich, with an electric volt of acidity to keep the wine lifted. The wine finishes with the firm backbone that’s always been a hallmark of Antucura’s Cabernets. Drink now-2025.

90 points from James Suckling at $15.99/bottle makes it a value that you should “go long” on.