{"id":20586,"date":"2014-09-17T08:38:35","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T12:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/?p=20586"},"modified":"2014-09-17T08:45:51","modified_gmt":"2014-09-17T12:45:51","slug":"nicolas-catena-laura-wine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/nicolas-catena-laura-wine\/","title":{"rendered":"Like Father, Like Daughter: Nicolas and Laura Catena"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Nicolas<\/a>Continued from Part 3 of Argentine Wine<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The Catena Alta Malbec Cabernet we\u2019re drinking smolders in the glass. Its sultry edge is more enticing than the sweet, soupy international style of many brand name grapes.<\/p>\n

Nicol\u00e1s believes that drinkers are shifting away from the herbal flavors of Cabernet and turning more toward wines like Malbec (and Syrah, Tempranillo, and Grenache) that have fleshy dark red fruit and violet flavors.<\/p>\n

Blending Malbec and Cabernet grapes is still traditional: \u201cThese blends give us French elegance and Latin passion,\u201d as Nicol\u00e1s explains.<\/p>\n

However, he no longer believes that Malbec needs Cabernet Sauvignon\u2014or any other grape\u2014to make great wine.<\/p>\n

Nicol\u00e1s is aided in his research by his daughter, Laura, who also has both a scientific mind and a bent for commerce.<\/p>\n

While she was pursuing her medical degrees at Harvard and Stanford universities, her father gave her a credit card.<\/p>\n

\"Chardonnay<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI told her that she could spend as much as she wanted, but it had to be on wine,\u201d Nicol\u00e1s says, a playful glint in his eyes.<\/p>\n

Laura now divides her time between San Francisco where she, her husband and three young children live and where she works as an emergency room doctor\u2014and Argentina, where she\u2019s export director for the winery.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s conducting fifteen hundred experiments on different variables that contribute to wine quality, such as vine exposure to the sun, pruning at different times of the year, irrigation methods and fermentation temperatures.<\/p>\n

Every season, she applies the successful methods to next year\u2019s vintage and adds more variables.<\/p>\n

\"Lady<\/a>Laura and her father believe that there is no one optimum moment in the vineyard as other producers do; rather there are many captured in the glass by harvesting the grapes as many as eight different times.<\/p>\n

Their view is that one harvest with one vinification (fermentation) is a one-dimensional wine, which is why they have more than three thousand separate vinifications.<\/p>\n

That may sound iconoclastic, but as Nicol\u00e1s observes, \u201cWe can innovate because the consumer has no history for us: we are creating that now.<\/p>\n

The French have a 500-year lead on us, but every year, we jump a decade in learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Argentina may be new in consumer memory, but it has a long history of winemaking. It\u2019s another country that doesn\u2019t fit neatly into either the Old World or New World categories, but is more Middle Earth.<\/p>\n

In 1541, Spanish conquistadors in search of silver (the Latin \u201cargentum\u201d after which the country is named) planted Tempranillo grapes in here to make wine for religious services (and for thirsty invaders).<\/p>\n

\"Cab<\/a><\/p>\n

For three centuries, that rough local wine was the only kind produced here until the nineteenth century, following Argentina\u2019s independence from Spain, when a flood of immigrants began to arrive from Spain, Italy, and France.<\/p>\n

Most were farmers and they brought with them treasured vine cuttings from the old country: Spanish Tempranillo and Torront\u00e9s, Italian Barbera and Sangiovese, and French Cabernet Sauvignon, Viognier and Malbec.<\/p>\n

However, things started to go downhill for the wine industry throughout the twentieth century, thanks to a variety of basket-case economic and political policies.<\/p>\n

But it was president Juan P\u00e9ron who really sent wine consumption into decline when he imposed high domestic taxes in the 1950s. (Someone had to pay for his lavish lifestyle with Evita.)<\/p>\n

Read Part 5 Malbec Wine<\/a> …
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part 3 of Argentine Wine The Catena Alta Malbec Cabernet we\u2019re drinking smolders in the glass. Its sultry edge is more enticing than the sweet, soupy international style of many brand name grapes. Nicol\u00e1s believes that drinkers are shifting away from the herbal flavors of Cabernet and turning more toward wines like Malbec (and Syrah, Tempranillo, and Grenache) that have fleshy dark red fruit and violet flavors. Blending Malbec and Cabernet grapes is still traditional: \u201cThese blends give us French elegance and Latin passion,\u201d as Nicol\u00e1s explains. However, he no longer believes that Malbec needs Cabernet Sauvignon\u2014or any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[371,405,113,214,319,341,369,585,758,324,24,3,342,1092,343],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-argentina-wine","category-barbera","category-best-wines","category-cabernet-sauvignon","category-learn-wine","category-making-wine","category-malbec-wine","category-sangiovese-wine-type","category-tempranillo","category-torrontes","category-wine-travel-to-wine-regions","category-wine-articles","category-winemakers","category-winemaking","category-women-and-wine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20586"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20642,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20586\/revisions\/20642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nataliemaclean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}