Alta-Yarí Gran Corte Cabernet Blend 2019

This one means a bit more to me than the average wine. About two years ago (and what feels like a lifetime ago), I was lucky enough to be hosted in Mendoza by Hervé and Diane Joyeaux Fabre, the couple behind Viñalba and Fabre Montmayou. After a memorable day spent walking their vineyards in the Uco Valley with a backdrop of the towering Andes Mountains, we headed over to the winery to do a bit of tasting. Amongst new vintages of all of their great wines was something I’d never seen before, a first taste of the previously unreleased Alta-Yarí Gran Corte. 

Alta-Yarí is a newer project for the Fabre’s, sourced from their high-altitude vineyard in Gualtallary. Gran Corte is the flagship wine for this brand and it represents a more contemporary blend than what is often found in Mendoza. Cab franc is the primary grape with smaller portions of malbec and cab sav. It starts with hand harvesting, followed by selection of first the bunches and then the individual grapes. The wine then sees 16 months in French oak. 

The finished wine is so compelling, so complex and so intensely delicious. The high-altitude vineyard provides minerality, structure and layering to deep, dark fruit flavours like blackcurrant, plum and cassis. Behind this are fine tannins and hints of graphite all leading to a velvety finish. It’s a little spicy, very aromatic and certainly built to age for a long time. Upon this wine’s release, Gran Corte was so clearly a triumph that leading South American wine reviewer Tim Atkin MW gave it a 97 point score. I’d say that’s pretty spot on.