We were blessed with another good harvest in Argentina. In general, quantity was down and quality was good. The climate was drier and warmer than normal, and the harvests were earlier. I’ve asked some of our winemakers to post their comments below.
We were blessed with another good harvest in Argentina. In general, quantity was down and quality was good. The climate was drier and warmer than normal, and the harvests were earlier. I’ve asked some of our winemakers to post their comments below.
Well, well well, here we go with some memorable details from La Consulta harvest. The most interesting thing is that the main restaurant of the town, now has competition but we still keep our loyalty to “Los Tilos” . The “home made pasta” and the “meat empanadas” are the best options for far. Despite the global crisis, the Casino from the town has good health, so half of the people go to gamble at night and the rest of the town likes to go during the day (like our assistant wine maker, Leo). This year we choose Mr. “Tito” Granado to pick our grapes, that is a kind of “Mr. T” from La Consulta, especially because he used to be a former picker from Chandon vineyards. He did a great job, especially his 22 boys when they ate 1,5 kilos each during the last barbecue (end of the harvest asado). I still owe money in the butchery.
Now talking about grapes, let’s remeber something about the winery. As everybody knows, we always finish very late in the Uco Valley, so we still have some wines fermenting. Because the season was very dry and warm, the sugar ripeness came very fast, but the phenol maturity came in a very slow way (no cold, no gold).
Regarding this situation, we modified our harvest program, so we decided to harvest in advance some grapes in order to have less alcohol. Other groups of grapes were harvested on time, and finally we picked some fruit in late April. So, in this way, we have a good combination of aromas and color in all our wines.
Because the early frost from the 14th of April in 2008, and too much warm during the summer generate a lot of dehydration, the vines had less reserve for the blossom and the production was lower, so we bled off less juice.
Another interesting situation came from the pH level, because we had very good pH’s in comparison with other years. I think that helped many wineries to have very good color extractions, but the tannins were not as sweet and round as other harvests. Also the Nitrogen concentration was low, so some of the fermentations stopped, leaving a lot of sugar to reduce.
Finally, I think is going to be a very good year but nothing spectacular, especially for the Malbecs. I think that the Cab’s are going to be cutting-edge and the whites are going to have less quality than other seasons.