Open a dictionary.
Well, if you can still find a hard copy dictionary, start flipping the pages until you find an entry for malbec.
The wine is noted for juicy fruits. Indeed, snobs often dismiss malbec for its friendly, fruit forward qualities. It’s a fun and enjoyable wine.
But an old school reference may find some wrinkles, recall long lost inflections of the varietal. You know how “sanguine” on one occasion may suggest reserved confidence, but in another may be employed to describe the aftermath of a bloody battle? Well there exists in the expression of malbec at its best hints of chocolate, tobacco, coconut and other gallantries.
With all this in mind, one could hold up Chacewater’s 2013 malbec as a reference point for the varietal.
“We’re pretty pleased with it,” said winemaker Mark Burch. “It’s a relatively elegant wine.”
Burch hedges — that word “relatively” — only because he knows how much the malbec yearned to strut, to swing its shoulders down the boardwalk, to kick sand in the face of more timid wines. Yet he introduced a small amount of petit verdot at the finish. Yes, adding another muscular varietal to batter down the cocky wine.
Somehow this strength against strength approach worked. On the nose it approaches with confidence and reflection, the intense impression of crushed blackberry and plum soothed by softly tapped leather, milk chocolate and coconut, husk and all.
Pour and sip, the wine again opens with a dense and forward punch of pureed berries and plum. Yet this is reined in by peppery spice and begins to settle. As it does, genteel cocoa and crumpled velour emerges — a worldly sensation that owes something to the splash of petit verdot. On its own, malbec tends to falter mid-palate.
Chacewater’s 2013 malbec gathers itself. The fruits build over a foundation of chocolate and leather, with hints of dry vanilla bean and tilled earth threatening from the edges. The richness continues to develop, wrapping up in a flourish of aging petals.
It’s a sophisticated wine, even with its fruit friendly gestures.
Burch took his time with the malbec, pressing early and cold soaking to control the tannic structure. He rested it in used French oak to impart some experience and then confined it to the bottle and let it sit.
“When you give it that much time it really improves,” the Chacewater vintner said. “It’s pushing two years in the bottle. That does a lot for a wine — especially a big wine.”
But the 2013 doesn’t feel bulked up and forward. It is a confident and almost reclusive wine, willing to reveal earthy nuance and mocha shade under the cauldron of berry and plum. It’s a nod to old world sophistication, with some new world flamboyance.
“We want to be true to the varietal,” Burch acknowledged, referring to the treatment during fermentation. The oak, the timing, the cold soaking — “that combination and the extra time, it allows the wine to be refined.”
And that’s why the image of Chacewater’s 2013 vintage belongs alongside any definition of malbec. It is bold and fruity, tempered by old world elegance.
That’s the dictionary image of a great wine.
Dave Faries can be reached at 900-2016
