Transcript:
Hello, bonjour, dear wine enthusiasts. Today is my lucky day as I’m going to taste with you the wine made from the highest vineyard in the entire world.
We know altitude does fantastic things for wine; it makes it powerful, but still very fresh and zingy. But how high can you go and still make a good wine? That’s our question today.
Is this any good at all? We’ll find out. So I’m going to tell you the story behind this wine, where it’s from, how it was made, etc.. And then I’m going to taste it with you, see what it tastes like. And at the end, I’ll give it a Julien score as well. Is this the best wine in the world, being the highest?
Let’s find out. Every story behind every wine is somewhat unique, but this one is clearly something else. It’s not just a different chateau in Bordeaux or another winery in Napa, slightly different from its neighbors. They all are. This is somewhat of an insane project put together by a few Argentine winemakers who all live and operate in extreme altitude vineyards of Argentina.
Uraqui, that’s how you pronounce the name, Uraqui, is made in the very small province of Juyjuy you’ve probably never heard of in the extreme north of Argentina, just north of the Salta province in the Andes Mountains headed towards Bolivia. We know that Salta has some of the highest vineyards in the world, and we know them really well at the club.
And they make stunning wines around the town of Cafayate in Salta, but this is even higher and rarer and crazier. So there around a little village of Humahuaca, one man called Claudio Zucchino challenges himself by making wine from two small and remote vineyards in the mountains, one at 8800 feet above, above sea level, and the other at 10,800 feet above sea level.
This last vineyard at 10,000 plus is the second highest vineyard in the world. Technically, there is indeed a higher vineyard in Tibet that holds the Guinness World Record for that. But no one has ever seen a bottle of that Tibet wine from there, as far as I know. So, in fact, this is the highest wine in the world.
And Claudio crops the vines up there organically. You don’t need a lot of products up there, harvests the grapes and makes the wine with the help of other local winemakers. He uses no oak, no chemicals. It’s just the grapes turned into vino. Interestingly, the bottles of wine are aged in an old barium sulfate mine higher even than the vineyard at 12,000 feet of altitude, one of the highest mines in the entire world ever.
And now the highest altitude wine cellar in the world. For the legend, I think they even use llamas to get the bottles up there. What a crazy and touching story. On top of that, Claudio’s father used to work in that mine up there when he was a child. So there is some history there as well. What a story from such a remote location.
But let’s get into the wine, shall we? We have here very dense and really dark color, almost black to the core, but looking really youthful still to the rim. It’s a five year old wine already, but it still looks quite youthful and a little bit purple to the rim, which indicates that it hasn’t matured much yet at all.
Really vibrant, dark, dense. But let’s smell. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. The vibrancy of the aromas here is unbelievable. It smells so really fresh of dark berries. It smells like one of those cassis liquor or blackcurrant liquor from France, from Burgundy. You find them here in France, we find a lot of those from Burgundy, black berries, strawberry jam, blueberry.
It’s incredibly, incredibly vibrant, honestly, have hardly ever tasted a wine that’s so vibrant. I’ve tasted my fair share of extreme altitude vineyards from Salta. But this is something else so fresh it smells some of some dark chocolate as well in the background, some toffee. So it’s fruity, but it’s also deep at the same time. Incredible. Let’s taste.
My Lord is this wine smooth. So smooth on your palate. The tannins are like the softest silk that you’ve ever put in your mouth, if you ever put silk in your mouth. Honestly, this is one of the softest wines I’ve ever tasted. Very dense, but very fine tone, and it’s got good acidity. I was expecting to be honest, a bit more acidity, it being more acidic, being of such extreme altitude.
But it feels they’ve actually pushed the grape maturity quite a bit here because the fruit flavors are really ripe, juicy, sweet baby flavors, somewhat cooked berries as well. It’s complex as well. Don’t get me wrong. I clearly taste the peppery and rubbery aromas from the Syrah — they’re in there. I forgot to mention this is made from 60%, 60% Malbec, of course, being from Argentina, but it’s got 30% Syrah in it and 10% Merlot.
I think I can taste the dark cherry from the merlot and this soft texture also is probably helped by the merlot. But what’s for sure is that it is a blend and you can sense, you can feel that it is a blend from being so complex and harmonious. I can taste that the wine not only made the wine from a vineyard, but they also worked on the blend and carefully calibrated the proportions of each grape variety to make it overall balanced and complex.
So overall, what do I make of this wine? Well, I love it. I love the smoothness, I love the freshness. I love the balance overall. I also love the depth, all the mixed spices that it’s got, the herbs, the black chocolate, the coffee in the background. It all adds to the complexity, the depth, the profoundness (does that exist?) of this wine.
It’s long as well. It’s also a wine that clearly has some aging potential. It’s 2018, five years old, but it’s still very useful. So we can probably age quite a lot more. 15, 20 years probably. I’m going to give this a 96 out of 100 points. It’s not the most concentrated wine you’ve ever tasted, so it’s not a 100.
But the harmony here is nearly perfect. And this combination of power and density, together with the acidity in the fresh fruit, fruit freshness, the fruitiness is truly unique, the hallmark of extreme attitude vineyards. And clearly this is one of the best extreme altitude wines I’ve ever tasted. And that’s not a small feat. This was it for me today, tasting the highest wine in the world.
If you want to continue learning ever more about wine, make sure to subscribe to the Bonner Wine Club. And there are videos for you to watch like this one on the Effects of Altitude on Wine and our playlist about wine knowledge and tasting everything you can learn about wine. It’s in there. It’s on the channel. I will see you soon in the wonderful world of wine. Cheers.
