Malbecs from Argentina fight the stereotypes

MANY cuisines brought by immigrants to the United States have long been pigeonholed as cheap and plentiful, part of a high-volume, low-margin business.

Efforts to serve more intricate dishes using better ingredients in more elegant surroundings face steep obstacles. The increased expense requires higher menu prices. Consumers often baulk, and ambitious Chinese chefs, for instance, prevented from showing the complexity and power of their cuisine, decide instead to work at more lucrative sushi bars.

It's tempting to think of malbec from the Mendoza region of Argentina as the cheap Chinese food of wine. People will happily accept it so long as malbec is inexpensive and cheerful. But they rebel if it aims higher.

In the US, the wine is popular and ubiquitous. People ask for malbec as if it were a brand name. Corner bars reliably stock it. These wines, most people assume, will be inexpensive. Generally, they are right.

But what if the vines were situated on rocky hillsides at higher altitudes, where the yields stay low naturally, rather than in the fertile flatlands where the yields are generous? What if they were meticulously tended by hand rather than by machine? What if the grapes were fermented in small lots, so that each section of the vineyard could be treated individually rather than homogenised in huge vats?

The result would be very different wines. One would be a wine intended to express the characteristics of a place, provided, in the considered judgment of the grower, that the place had a character worth expressing. The other would be a generous, fruity wine that might well be enjoyable but innocuous, with little depth, character or sense of place. The high-altitude wine would most likely cost more. But the difference in price would go toward a more distinctive wine. Whether it is worth the higher price is the sort of decision wine consumers must make all the time.

Here at Wine School, we regularly ponder the differences between wines and the reasons for their pricing. We know that higher prices do not always buy better wines.

Sometimes prices are derived from perceived status: Wines from Napa Valley can charge more because Napa adds value not attributed to wines from, say, Lake County. Or a celebrity lends a name, and the price rises as marketers seek to capitalise on the glitz. Occasionally the price is a direct result of a basic economic law, like supply and demand.

But pricing can sometimes be tied directly to the means of production. Mass-produced wines that take advantage of the economies of scale will often be cheaper than those that are the products of laborious farming and careful craft.

For the last month, we have been drinking Mendoza malbecs. As usual, I recommended three bottles. The three were Zuccardi Mendoza Paraje Altamira Concreto Malbec 2017 (US$28); Catena Alta Mendoza Malbec Historic Rows 2015 (US$35) and Altos Las Hormigas Mendoza Appellation Gualtallary Malbec 2016 (US$38).

The idea was to get wines a cut or two above the mass-market malbecs in an effort to examine wines intended to be more expressive of place.

This sometimes means spending a little more money than might be comfortable because some wines legitimately cost more. If we refuse to do this, we are left to focus on only a small segment of wine's possibilities.

Consider the decisions that wine producers make all the time. Must Beaujolais be only a pleasant, refreshing knock-back wine? Don't underestimate the pleasure in wines like that. We need vins de soif, or thirst quenchers. But what if Beaujolais could be more expressive than that? What if chenin blanc from California could be more than a cheap component for inexpensive blended wines? What if garnacha could do more in Spain than make alcoholic fruit bombs?

We need winemakers to ask these questions, and to find answers. If they did not, we would have far fewer interesting wines in the world. So let's not be so quick to doubt either the potential of Mendoza malbec or the sincerity of those who are seeking to demonstrate it in their wines.

A relentless desire to test the limits of malbec drove producers in the 1990s from the flat, loamy clay vineyards of the Luján de Cuyo region near the city of Mendoza to higher elevations in the Uco Valley in search of stonier sites and cooler temperatures.

The Zuccardi comes from the Paraje Altamira area in the southern part of the Uco Valley while the Altos Las Hormigas comes from Gualtallary, farther north in the Uco. The grapes for the Catena come partly from Luján de Cuyo and partly from the Uco, including its Adrianna Vineyard, a pioneering high-altitude site at almost 5,000 feet in Tupungato.

I found each of these wines far more interesting than the typical inexpensive jammy malbec. The Zuccardi was dark and plummy, with an aromatic note of leafiness. On the palate, it was earthy and focused, with a touch of unsweetened licorice. I thought it was lovely.

The Altos Las Hormigas had flavours more of red fruit. It was also earthy and dry, yet deep and rich. The Catena Alta was the most tannic of the three, and the most reticent despite being older. It, too, was plummy and earthy. One thing they all had in common: On the day after I originally opened the bottles, they each got better, deeper and more detailed. The Zuccardi developed mineral flavours, as did the Altos Las Hormigas. The Catena developed complexity and the tannins softened. They each showed an ability to evolve, in the glass, in the bottle and, I'd wager, in the cellar if you left them to age a few more years. You would not see that in ordinary, inexpensive malbecs. NYTIMES