Bodega Garzon Uruguay Reserva Tannat 2017
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#98 Wine Enthusiast Top 100 Wines of 2019
Deep purple in color, this Tannat fresh aromas reminiscent of red and black fruits such as plums and raspberries on a spice-flavored aroma. It has a great personality in mouth. Its ripe tannins and its minerality make it a terroir wine of great identity.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A balanced yet dense tannat with dark-berry, mineral and floral aromas. Black-tea undertones. Medium body and a delicious, juicy finish.
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Wine Spectator
An intensely juicy version, with raspberry and red plum flavors that feature pepper and slate accents. Features grippy tannins, with crunchy minerality, on the finish. Drink now through 2025.
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Wine & Spirits
This grows in Uruguay’s coastal hills, where Alejandro Bulgheroni invested in planting more than 1,000 parcels of vines. Working with consulting oenologist Alberto Antonini, the team fermented this wine in cement vats, then aged it in stainless steel and oak uprights. It’s tannat in a bright, spicy, accessible style, with an underlying structure that’s slowly revealed with air. The dark, iron-like tannins gain power as it opens, lending the wine the weight for sautéed calf ’s liver with onions.
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Wine Enthusiast
For textbook modern Uruguayan Tannat, look no further than this. A ripe black-fruit aroma melds with flowers, while this is smooth and balanced on the palate. Blackberry and spiced plum flavors are lightly touched by oak and peppery spice, with a steady finish that brings this home.
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The Greatest Wines of the World are produced where the grape variety finds the ideal conditions to express itself in a natural and authentic way; like at Garzón, where they produce wines that result from the perfect integration of terroir and the different cultivated varieties.
Bodega Garzón is close to Punta del Este, La Barra and José Ignacio, the Uruguayan paradise with mesmerizing landscapes and the perfect combination of past, present and future. The charm of this sophisticated region, located among sloping hills that meet the sea is portrayed in the postcards of Garzón, a small town with 600 inhabitants which is home to tourists, farmers and local artists. This picturesque landscape offers the best environment for their vineyards, orchards and groves.
The wines love the terroir of Garzón with its ballast hills, a soft, stony soil and Atlantic breezes flowing over the vines that result in perfect conditions for creating elegant and complex wines. Therefore, Garzon products are the result of a careful selection of terroir which is appropriate for the development of premium wines and a wide range of grape varieties. This allows the best winemakers to experiment with a new environment and create optimal blends for a market increasingly eager for new wines. The resultant winemaking is focused on producing wines of the highest quality with a distinctive identity, strong personality and sense of place.
Named for its naturally high level of tannins, Tannat is a brooding, rustic, dark red wine that sees its origin in the Madiran region of France. Similar to Malbec’s journey to Argentina from France, Tannat made a similar move in the early 19th century but landed in Uruguay in the hands of Basque settlers. Today Tannat thrives in its warm South American climate, producing a bold, black fruit driven red. Somm Secret—Uruguay producers have the freedom to blend firm Tannat with any other grape whereas Madiran law restricts Tannat’s blending grapes to Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and the indigenous grape, Fer.
Considered one of the most environmentally sustainable countries in the world, Uruguay is also the fourth largest wine producing country in South America. But in contrast to its neighbors (Chile, Argentina and even Brazil) Uruguay keeps more in step with its European progenitors where land small holdings are most common. Most Uruguayan farms are tiny (averaging only about five hectares) and family-run, many dating back multiple generations. At this size, growers either make small amounts of wine for local consumption or sell grapes to a nearby winery. In all of Uruguay there are close to 3,500 growers but fewer than 300 wineries.
On these small plots of land, manual tending and harvesting, as well as low yields are favored; this small agricultural country has never had a need for large-scale chemical fertilizers or insecticides. Their thriving meat industry also follows the same standards: hormones have been banned since 1968 and today all Uruguayan beef is organic and grass-fed.
Uruguay’s best vineyards are on the Atlantic coast, in Canelones and Maldonado (where cooling breezes lessen humidity) or found hugging its border with Argentina. With a climate similar to Bordeaux and soils clay-rich and calcareous, Uruguay is perfect for Tannat, a thick-skinned, red variety native to Southwest, France. A great Tannat from Uruguay will have no lack of rich red and black fruit, lots of sweet spice and a hefty structure. Sometimes winemakers blend Merlot or Pinot noir with Tannat to soften up its rough edges.
The best Uruguayan whites include Sauvignon blanc and Albarino.