If there’s one thing I (self) loathe about wine reviewers, it’s the affinity and immediate retreat into cliches. There’s an ease to utilizing familiar tropes which with people identify, if only because it’s ritual and rote memory. Parker and Suckling invented a whole generation of us to exhaust the practice, laughing all the way to the bank the entire time. And yet we find ourselves guilty of swimming in the same deep waters, bottle after bottle, trying (and sometimes failing) to convey new vocabulary to a system that is over sixty years compacted into the terroir of the practice. But the challenge is very real: to get buy-in stripped of pretense and convey the experience of enjoying a glass freshly decanted from a new approach. We’ve already opted not to deliver a rating system by which people can quickly consume the score and then click through. How much more needs to be done until we reach the very best form of ourselves? Quite a lot. Part therapy, part refinement, all good.
I popped this open the other night. And perhaps it was
the stillness and cold pre-Spring air, but this did the job in delivering comfort. A
very bold bottle that was easy on the tannins and light on acidity. It carried
the classic Mendoza Malbec flavor profile without leaning too heavily on the
ever-present blackberry note, and at under $20 a bottle, it’s a reasonable
value.
Finca El Origen
$14 USD