2023 Catena Zapata Chardonnay White Bones Adrianna River Vineyard Gualtallary Mendoza 750 ml

The world’s greatest wines are all sui generis, with a signature style and personality that sets them apart from their peers.

In the world of Chardonnay, no one would confuse Kongsgaard’s The Judge with Montrachet, or even Marcassin. Yet tasting any of those bottles makes it clear why they command $500+ price—and Catena’s 2023 White Bones clearly belongs in that club.

It’s made by South America’s most famous winemaker—acknowledged as “The Messi of Wine” by Wine Advocate—from a single block of the most treasured vineyard in Argentina, Adrianna River. The soils there are packed with limestone and fossils that give the wine its name, and the resulting wine is singular in its electric clarity and tension between citrus, orchard fruit, and a razor’s-edge minerality.

Alejandro Vigil stands out among an increasingly competitive Argentine wine community because of his relentless drive and fanatical attention to detail. There’s seemingly no labor he won’t undertake in pursuit of quality. It has earned him 100-point scores and celebrity status: “The fandom I observed must be comparable to strolling a music trade show in the presence of Mick Jagger,” noted the Wine Advocate about Vigil’s visit to a wine fair.

And that attention to detail pairs perfectly with the drive of his longtime employer, Catena. “It is difficult to avoid hyperbole when discussing the Catena family's impact on Argentine wine,” the Advocate noted, and Burgundy is increasingly a touchpoint for Catena Zapata. Laura Catena has discussed how the family’s search to make Malbec more transparent led them to adopt Burgundian practices like more punch-downs and whole-cluster fermentation—and it also makes this wine at home in the company of Puligny or Grand Cru Chablis.

This hails from the legendary “Block 1” of the Catena family’s crown jewel parcel: the Adrianna River Vineyard. At 4,757 feet above sea level, where UV intensity rivals that of Mount Kilimanjaro, the intensity of the sunlight—plus the vineyard’s limestone soil and dramatic diurnal variation—allows Chardonnay to achieve a level of phenolic complexity and mineral tension that has earned the site cult status among the world's top Chardonnay collectors.