2014 Cheval des Andes

Winemaker Lorenzo Pasquini made a point of telling me that “the style of Cheval des Andes has been evolving in favor of elegance as of 2012,” which may seem a bit redundant to long-time followers of this joint venture established in 1999 between Cheval Blanc and its director Pierre Lurton and Terrazas de los Andes, as this wine has stood out for its clarity and class virtually since the outset. Pasquini went on: “We’re looking for an expression of Mendoza but with a message in line with Cheval Blanc. And we’re trying to get even greater ageability. The biggest challenge we have is put collectors around the world in the mind of great wines that can gain in complexity and value. And we’re looking for greater elegance, which for us means complexity on the nose—a wine that whispers rather than shouts—and a wine of balance rather than power. We don’t want overly sweet Malbec, and we want our wine to be fresh but not too acidity. We harvest early and we don’t make overstructured wines; a wine must be interesting at every stage of its life.”

Cheval des Andes is made entirely from estate vines, about three-quarters of them in their Las Compuertas vineyard on fine sand and clay soil in Luján de Cuyo and one-quarter in Altamira in the Uco Valley. The team achieves ripeness earlier in the cycle by the way they farm the vineyards (Pasquini also directs viticulture) and the irrigation choices they make. “The biggest variable here [Pasquini was referring to the home vineyard of Las Compuertas] is influencing the phenolic cycle.” In 2018, to cite the most recent vintage, the harvest took place between March 12 and 27, while in 2017 it stretched from March 6 through April 10.

Although the Cheval des Andes wine has frequently shown a light Cheval Blanc-like tobacco leaf character through the years, it has been a consistently ripe wine. “For us, greenness is a defect of Cabernet Sauvignon, not a classic character of the variety,” Pasquini explained. “And the Malbec spectrum is quite broad, ranging from yellow fruits to black pepper to violet—like Sangiovese—to spices—Syrah-like in a Côte du Rhône way—to red fruits to black fruits, and then to overripe porty fruit. But Malbec should never have a green pepper quality.” The wine is very much a blend: of mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, with Malbec and a bit of Petit Verdot. (The Las Compuertas estate originally featured some Cabernet Franc and Merlot, but those two varieties, planted on a rocky part of the vineyard, had not made the blend since 2007 and were recently pulled out and scheduled to be replanted to Malbec in 2019.)

Pasquini described 2014 as "a fresh and humid year, the coldest since 2001." As the late-ripening Cabernet Sauvignon suffered more, the Cheval des Andes blend is unusually heavy on Malbec and the quantity produced was low. He added that the '14 will be reserved for clients in the Western Hemisphere while the 2015, from another humid but warmer growing season, will be sold mostly in Europe. Two thousand sixteen was the third consecutive humid year, and much cooler than 2015, with the late-ripening Cabernet Sauvignon again suffering.