Aguinaldo Záckia Albert, a knowledgeable and affable São Paulo wine writer, holds tastings at a nearby restaurant, and I decided to go to this one because it featured the wines of Susana Balbo. The mid-level Crios series is a best-seller, but the few that I’ve tasted were just not my palate. Since I’m not a fan of Catena’s best-selling Alamos series but appreciate their higher end wines, this was an opportunity to, perhaps, come to a similar conclusion with respect to Balbo.
Susana Balbo had an illustrious career at several wineries, including Catena Zapata, until she and her husband, Pedro Marchevsky, an agricultural engineer, went solo in 1999. They built a state of the art winery in Agrelo, Lujan de Cujo, and have been extremely successful. Susana takes care of vinification, and Pedro of viticulture. Susana is also president of Wines of Argentina, the most important Argentinean trade organization. Phyloxera never made it to Balbo’s neck of the Andes so, according to Aguinaldo, all Balbo wines are made from ungrafted rootstocks.
2007 Domínio Del Plata Crios de Susana Balbo Rosé de Malbec 14% (Brazil cost $28, US cost $9)
Dark cranberry color, unusually dark for a rosé. Fresh nose of strawberry and stems. Soft tannins, pronounced acidity, very noticeable alcohol, some additional cherry. Thick glycerin tears on the glass. Way too hot for my taste. The room seemed to like it, but I just don’t get the point of this. Perhaps their marketing dept. has identified an unsatisfied demand for rosé in the lumberjack community.
2007 Dominio Del Plata Crios de Susana Balbo Malbec 14% (Brazil cost $34, US cost $10)
Dark ruby. Aargh, telltale nose of American oak vanilla, plus eucalyptus and toast. Aguinaldo says 50% American oak, 50% French oak. Plum flavor with toast. Very noticeable alcohol, way too hot for my taste. Unlike the rosé, in this case I cut some slack because of the pre-pubescence. But, still, I wonder why anyone would want to drink plum toast flambée.
2005 Dominio Del Plata Crios de Susana Balbo Syrah/Bonarda 13.5% (Brazil cost $34, US cost $12)
Darker ruby. 50% each grape. More interesting nose of plum, caramel and burnt sugar. Tastes a bit like cough syrup with pepper. Less body than preceding, and I don’t like the sudden suspicion that body, here, appears 100% correlated to alcohol content. Liked this a little better, perhaps because it has some age. Next!
2005 Dominio Del Plata Ben Marco Malbec 13.7% (Brazil cost $68, US cost $13)
Even darker ruby, almost black. 90% malbec/10% bonarda. 11 months in French oak. Nose shows plum, caramel and mint. Excellent mouth feel, good fruit, alcohol much better integrated. My WOTN (not saying much), though it fell apart in the glass towards the end of the evening. Not a kosher wine.
2005 Dominio Del Plata Susana Balbo Cabernet Sauvignon 14% (Brazil cost US$85, US cost $28)
Almost black. 85% cabernet/15% merlot. 13 months in new French oak. Blackberry nose with a hint of rosemary. Very tannic, medicinal flavor, some chocolate. Very alcoholic, again too hot for my taste. Develops some complexity with aeration, ends the evening better than the preceding, though with an indeterminate personality, neither Bordeaux nor Argentina.
In conclusion, obviously I came away unimpressed. High alcohol content does not usually bother me, but here it did. I asked Aguinaldo why the alcohol levels were so high, and he said it was because of the heat in Mendoza, which makes grapes very ripe. That doesn’t jive with information I’ve read elsewhere, that 2006 was the first vintage in which the majority of producers in Mendoza did not have to chaptalize. Perhaps someone better informed can chime in on this. No tango analogies, please.
So, the wines of Susana Balbo are competently made but, I’m sorry, they just seem to me utterly lacking in soul (obviously the soul of a vine does not reside in its rootstock, otherwise we’d be lost). Perhaps this sample wasn’t representative of Balbo’s very best, but there was too much alcohol and not enough finesse, possibly a nod to supercharged contemporary palates. At the medium level, I prefer Felipe Rutini and Catena, and Achaval-Ferrer’s basic malbec. At the lower end, I prefer Rutini’s Trumpeter line to either Alamos or Crios. At the higher end, Achaval-Ferrer’s Fincas and the Vina Cobos Marchiori remain the benchmarks for malbec. Alas, the search continues.
