Tim Atkins Chilean Red wine of the Year 2022 - a modern icon of a wine.
A unique Malbec from a high altitude site deep into the Chilean Andes. The combination of altitude and luminosity combine to produce a wine with intense concentration and personality.
Intense, almost black in colour. The nose is an explosion of aromas, pronouced violet notes with blackberry and blueberry fruit characters and herbal notes of aniseed and fennel. The wine is full bodied and full of life with an abundance of ripe juicy dark fruits and a graphite minerality. Noticable mountain freshness helps to provide great texture and balance to a brilliant and characterful Malbec.
Established in 2002, Tabalí is a pioneer and iconic winery situated in Limarí, on the edge of the Atacama Desert in one of the northernmost vineyard regions of Chile. They were one of the first wineries to settle in Limarí and their wines faithfully reflect their place of origin in which climate and soils play a fundamental role, and bring out the potential of each of their vineyards.
After years of geological research, Tabalí is the only winery that producers wines that cross Chile from east to west in the same valley (D.O.), from their incredibly high and remote site of Roca Madre (second highest vineyard in Chile) in the Andes Mountains' Rio Hurtado area down to their cool climate, 'Camanchaca' fog blanked vineyards by the Pacific Ocean. In their quest for the perfection, they now also have a site in the renowned Cabernet and Merlot region of Maipo Valley. The result is a range of truly distinctive wines with elegance, restraint and minerality which the dynamic team of Felipe Muller (winemaker) and Hector Rojas (viticulturalist) have attributed to their cabinet full of the wine world's most prestigious trophies. In 2014, Felipe Müller was name 'Chilean Young Winemaker of the Year' and acclaimed for his ability to understand Tabali´s distinctive terroir and use it to create remarkable wines, unique to Chile.
This wine was produced exclusively with Malbec grapes from the Río Hurtado vineyard, which is in the Limarí Valley right in the Andes mountains, just 45km from Argentina. At an altitude of 1,600 metres above sea level, this singular mountain vineyard is one of the three highest in Chile. The vineyard is on an east-facing slope and only receives sunshine in the mornings and early afternoons. There is therefore great thermal amplitude - the difference between daytime and night-time temperatures can even exceed 20ºC. In winter the vineyard can be completely covered with snow while rain is falling lower down in the valley. This is a very special soil, because the volcanic rock (andesite) decomposed right there and slowly formed a thin layer of soil. It is very fractured and this enables the roots to venture down and explore the whole geological profile. This lends the wines quality, elegance, complexity and, above all, an unrivalled typicity. The harvest began in the first week of April, when the grapes had reached the optimum phenolic ripeness. The clusters were manually selected before going to the destemmer, where the grapes were separated from their stalks.
The grapes passed once more through a manual selection before being fed into small stainless steel tanks where they fermented at 22-27ºC. The wine was aged in French oak barrels for 18 months.
Juicy rare steak.
Tim Atkin Chilean Red Wine of the Year 2022
