Vina Alicia

Vina Alicia is owned by Alicia Mateu de Arizu, wife of celebrated winemaker and agronomist Alberto Arizu, owner of 105-year-old Luigi Bosca; and Rodrigo, one of her three sons. The other two sons, Gustavo and Alberto, work with their father Alberto Arizu at the family's other, higher profile winery, Luigi Bosca.

Viña Alicia is focused on producing small amounts of extremely high quality wines from choice vineyard blocks. The "Cuarzo" blend is made up of Petit Verdot and Carignane clones originally from France, and Australian Grenache originally from Noon Estate in South Australia. The Nebbiolo clones came from Italy.

The blocks that now make up Viña Alicia's wines come from two of the family's vineyards. The first is a twenty-acre parcel that sits behind the winery itself, planted with Malbec, Nebbiolo, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Grenache Noir, Carignane, Riesling, and Semillon, plus a few other stragglers. This vineyard has a mind-blowing vine density of nearly 4,500 vines per acre (11,000 plants per hectare) making it the most densely planted vineyard in the country.

The other is a 30-acre vineyard of nearly 100-year-old Malbec vines, which includes a painstakingly grafted 2.4-acre block of what the Arizu's call "Brote Negro." Over the years of working this vineyard, Alberto Sr. noticed a strange variation in some of his Malbec vines. Some of them produced leaves that looked more like the leaves of a Cabernet vine, and their berries were smaller and darker than normal Malbec, and when the fruit got ripe, just near harvest, the stems turned dark -- hence the name "Brote Negro" or "black stem." Arizu painstakingly spent over a decade selectively cloning this mutated version of Malbec until he had a small vineyard block of it, from which Alicia now makes one of her wines.

The vineyards are farmed for very low yields (partially guaranteed by vine density) and harvest is done completely by hand in several passes through the vineyard, sometimes over weeks, to ensure only perfect ripe clusters of grapes are picked. The grapes are hand sorted and then most often hand de-stemmed using a special latticework table developed by the family for this purpose. The wines are fermented in small lots, specific to vineyard blocks, with natural yeasts whenever possible, and bottled without filtration and with only a light fining using egg whites. Some of the Malbec and the Cabernet are actually fermented in French oak, in addition to being aged in it.

Viña Alicia's first commercial vintage was 1998 when they produced 290 cases. Their current production level is around 1700 cases across their various wines. The most intriguing wines here include Argentina's best (and only) Nebbiolo-possibly the most convincing example of this variety that we've tasted outside Piemonte-and the rare Brote Negro, made from an old clone of Malbec. The boutique operation of the Arizu family empire is the source of some of Argentina's most distinctive wines. T