by Matt Kramer
Issue: June 30, 2010
LUJÁN DE CUYO, Argentina-For a guy with an MBA from Stanford, Santiago Achával can sound like a mystic. “All the great Malbec vineyards I’ve walked in have a serenity.” He smiles when he says this, but he’s serious.

Achával, 49, came to the Mendoza region in search not just of Malbec (finding that is no more difficult than locating sand on a beach) but of great Malbec. Make no mistake: The Mendoza region, with its 356,000 acres of vines, harbors great Malbec. But when Achával started his search in the late 1990s, such diamonds were decidedly rough.
“When we acquired our first vineyard, Finca Altamira, in March 1999, two-thirds of the vines were nonyielding,” he recalls. “It was a very old vineyard and we bought [it] for the price of the raw land. The seller was happy that we didn’t ask for a discount for having to rip out the old vines!”
Achával had no intention of removing the old vines, of course. Quite the opposite-he wanted to nurture them. “Even as late as 1999, people didn’t want old vines,” he says. “For years the government encouraged growers to rip out old vineyards and plant new ones because they are more productive.”
What makes Achával’s story more interesting yet is that he is not a winemaker. That’s Roberto Cipresso begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, a highly regarded Tuscan enologist who’s a minority partner in Achával-Ferrer.
“I was just a wine enthusiast,” Achával admits. “And not only that, I’m from Córdoba, not Mendoza.” Córdoba is 380 miles east of Mendoza, about a seven-hour drive.
He continues to live in Córdoba and “commutes” to the winery. A sizable proportion of his time is spent traveling, especially in the U.S. (by far his single-biggest market) promoting his wines.
This promotion is essential if only because the three Achával-Ferrer single-vineyard bottlings-Finca Altamira, Finca Mirador and Finca Bella Vista-sell for some of the highest prices of any Malbec made in Argentina, upwards of $100 a bottle.
Asking such a price, when genuinely good Malbecs sell for as little as $10 a bottle, borders on the quixotic, if not in some eyes the downright traitorous. (You might recall a similar saga with Italy’s Angelo Gaja when, in the 1980s, he demanded prices well in excess of what others thought “proper” for an Italian wine, no matter how good.)
Achával knows that he has to deliver. And he knows that this, in turn, requires two things: very old vines and very low yields. “When we bought our vineyards, the old vines were trained to produce 3 to 4 tons an acre. You can get good, decent fruit at that level. But no minerality. So each year we kept reducing the yield. Finally we arrived at the quality we wanted: It requires a yield of 1 ton an acre.
“We also discovered something else: You can’t make those ancient vines go from what they were used to producing to 1 ton an acre. It’s like you’ve got a former weightlifter and you’re training him to a new sport. It takes three to four years to get them there.”
He points out another benefit from such low yields from old vines. “We harvest two to three weeks before everyone else. This is because the low yields give riper tannins sooner. It also means that our alcohol levels are moderate. This year, for example, our average alcohol level, fermented completely dry, is 13.3 percent.”
The results are stunning, especially the showcase single-vineyard wines. These are Malbecs a Burgundian could love, as each is distinctively, even dramatically, different. Finca Altamira (14 acres), from the La Consulta district of the Uco Valley 50 miles south of Mendoza, displays rich, intense wild cherry-with-a tang fruit.
Its opposite is the more delicate Finca Bella Vista (10 acres), which is flowery, with pronounced mineral notes-a Chambolle-Musigny among Malbecs. Finca Mirador (14 acres), also in Luján de Cuyo, is rich and chocolaty, with hints of minerality, tobacco, dried cherry and spices. It seems to mature the soonest of the three.
The best deal, by the way, is Achával-Ferrer’s “Mendoza” Malbec, which is blended from four other vineyards, three of them boasting vines 80 to 100 years old. Offering the signature rich, lush style of the pricier single-vineyard wines, it also delivers a surprising measure of their characters at a much lower price ($22).
Matt Kramer has contributed to Wine Spectator regularly since 1985.