Catena Zapata, Nicolas Catena Zapata, Mendoza 2021

Sweet tobacco, cigar box, berries and minerals. It gets a little zesty and citrusy on the nose. Really refined and juicy on the palate with lot of fine tannins. Silky, fluid and linear with a very elegant, soft-spoken finish. 46% cabernet sauvignon from Adrianna vineyard and 44% malbec and 10% cabernet franc from Nicasia vineyard. Really refined, long and Bordelais. This is already drinking really well, but it will hold like this for a long time.

A cool vintage, although not as much as 2016, with precision and nuance, floral aromatics, raspberry leaf, black cherry and brambled hedgerow fruit, with tobacco and chamomile flowers, smoky and intense. This vintage sees a new label for the first time since this wine was first released back in 1997, pointing to what makes it so different from many Argentinian Cab-Malbec blends (ungrafted pre-phylloxera vines, whole cluster vinification, massal selection programme leading to the diversity of their DNA). 50% new oak for ageing. Alejandro Vigil winemaker. Tasted twice.

The 2021 Nicolás Catena Zapata was produced with a blend of 46% Cabernet Sauvignon, 44% Malbec and 10% Cabernet Franc from Nicasia and Adrianna vineyards. It fermented in small oak barrels, concrete and stainless steel tanks and matured in 2,000-liter oak foudres for 18 months. It's a powerful but fresh red with 13.7% alcohol and mellow acidity, perhaps because the Cabernet Sauvignon was picked earlier (and with lower yields) and they discarded the clay soils and went more for stony plots. The wine feels more streamlined and elegant. 2021 is a cool and very good year, following the path of the 2019, and the wine shows the classical herbal and spicy character of the Bordeaux varieties with pungent notes of black peppercorns and is spicier because of the high Cabernet Franc content. 64,200 bottles produced. It was bottled in November 2022.