This is an absolutely textbook, pure expression of Malbec from the south of Argentina. With considerable depth, it has many layers of aromas and flavours, with the crunchy, spicy, sweet black fruit delivered in a rounded, elegant, textured manner with great concentration and freshness (14.5%).
£15.99 Laithwaite’s
IF YOU CAN win the International Trophies for Red Single Varietal both over and under £15 in the same year, you must be doing something right. An impressive double triumph for Argentina’s Bodegas Fabre, owner of Viñalba, Fabre Montmayou and Phebus, and a regular Trophy winner at the DWWA. In fact, the 2013 vintage of this wine won the under £15 International Trophy last year also.
Our judges loved this wine’s big, weighty, chunky structure, as well as its floral nuances and sheer accessibility, without any need for excessive, cosmetic oak to mask the fruit.
Like Bodegas Fabre’s other International Trophy in this year’s awards (see opposite page), this wine is Malbec – but not as many people know it. Sourced from Patagonia, it is, as owner and winemaker Hervé Joyaux Fabre says, ‘a different style of Malbec from a very different region of Argentina’.
‘It is very elegant and has a lot of finesse due to a fresher climate and the huge variation in day and night temperatures in summer in Patagonia,’ he explains. ‘With this wine we offer the wine lover the opportunity to experience a new kind of Malbec, with a vibrant fruit expression.’
Produced by Fabre since 2008, the wine is made in a style that doesn’t broadcast its ‘New World’ origins, with flavours that incline more towards red fruits than black – and a character that is personified by elegance as much as exuberance.
Fabre Montmayou’s vineyards in Patagonia offer winelovers ‘a new kind of Malbec’
Tasted against
Château Lagrézette, Clos Marguerite, Massaut, Cahors, France 2012 • Concha y Toro, Terrunyo Block 27 Carmenere Lot No 1, Peumo, Cachapoal, Chile 2013 • Gaia Estate, Agiorgitiko, Nemea, Peloponnese, Greece 2012 • Houghton, Jack Mann Cabernet Sauvignon, Frankland River, Western Australia 2013.
