Familia Marguery produces its wines in Cruz de Piedra, Maip? in Argentina's Mendoza Valley. With a capacity of 90,000 cases, the winery is equipped with stainless steel tanks and temperature controls, machine press, conveyor belt for selecting the grapes and the latest generation of pumps.
Once the winemakers have decided that the grapes are ready to harvest, they gather their crew early in the morning and the picking is done by hand in 32 pound boxes. At this stage, great care is taken so that the grapes will be clean, fresh and healthy when delivered to the winery.
After a thorough selection, only the grapes with no defects are placed into a crushing machine which lightly squeezes them. The resulting mush of skins and juice is pumped into stainless steel tanks for the first fermentation to start. Cultured yeasts are added and temperature rises naturally due to soft contact treatments for extracting sweet and mature tannins. Temperature is tightly controlled until the end of the process. After 25 to 30 days of maceration, malolactic fermentation takes place. When this process finishes, the wine is finally stored in oak casks for 12 months.
Malbec grapes are reasonably small, very dark, and juicy. Controlling the fruiting of the vines is important to ensure good concentration of flavors. Fortunately, the Argentine wine industry's almost 100% reliance on irrigation (it virtually never rains) gives growers the tools they need to ensure quality grapes and thus quality wines.
A young Malbec presents a very dense and dark color of cherry red. This red color can evolve into almost black and with time into an elegant ruby red. Morello cherry, black and blue berries, plum and raisins are the main aromas in fine Malbec. For some specialists the violet, the strawberry and the amber are its three main aromas. In the mouth, flavors like plum, plum marmalade, morello cherry and morello cherry marmalade appear. Malbec wines are warm, soft and they present pleasant sweet tannins once they start to evolve. The aroma and flavor of vanilla, chocolate, cacao and coffee arises from aging in fine oak barrels. Our selection has all the components we look for in great Malbec along with tremendous aging potential.
March 2010 Limited Series Newsletter (.pdf)
