Ok, It’s (probably) not what you’re thinking.

What I wanted to do today was highlight the versatility of Argentine Malbec – not just because it’s capable of delivering more than the tongue-coating, savory inkiness of a dry red that we’re used to, but also because I’m kind of all-Malbeced-out from my South American jaunt, and so if I’m gonna cover Malbec it’s gonna need to be a little creative.

Not that creative… look, you really need to get your mind out of the gutter, alright? It’s not even the weekend for krissakes!

So… I grabbed three Argentine Malbecs made in three totally different styles from the ever-expanding and totally-over-run-with-cardboard-boxes sample pool known as my basement, and we hit the grill for some BQ goodness to match up with it all.

My tasting experiment wasn’t without its slight disappointments, but it did yield a crowd-pleasing “sleeper” of a dessert wine – one that happens to deliver a serious amount of bang-for-the-buck, and also even more serious amounts of the “gee-I didn’t-know-they-made-this-kind-of-stuff” factor.  More on that in a minute (or two).

As I suspect is the case with many three-ways, ours started with imbibing some bubbly…

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The important part about Turning The Towels Teal is that you can do some good just by drinking wine, which I’m pretty sure most of you reading will agree is the coolest helping-out-a-good-cause activity variant.

Throughout September (Ovarian Cancer Awareness month), Frederick Wildman and Sons will be donating $.50 of the U.S. sales of every bottle of Folonari and Trapiche wines (which they import) to the Turn the Towels Teal® campaign, which promotes Ovarian Cancer awareness and donations. 

If you friend up Wildman on Facebook, they will also donate $1; tweeting about their donation page via twitter will generate a $.50 donation. Now that I think about it, you don’t even actually have to get off your duff to help out. But since getting off your duff will be a lot more fun, here are a couple of Trapiche recommendations to get you started…

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Whew!

When I agreed with South American PR firm Brandabout to join them on a wine-touring excursion to Chile and Argentina, I never expected to come back with enough material to fill a novella.  But that’s more or less what happened – and that’s after shelving the idea for about five more articles from the trip.

Over the last six months or so, I’ve featured the good, the bad, the ugly, and the stunning from my South American jaunt, all with the intention of trying to provide coverage that is more personal, in-depth, and human that you might otherwise find when it comes to on-location wine coverage. While helpful in introducing you to a wine region, the tourist-angle stuff rarely gets into the nitty-gritty of what the wines – and the people – are really like, on their own turf and their own terms.

Hopefully, the stories from my travels brought you close to those kinds of insights, or taught you something new, or engendered an idea to try a wine that maybe you’ve never heard of before.  Or at the very least kept your mind of your mortgage/rent payment for a few minutes and kept you from surfing porn…

Below, after the jump, are links to the entire wrap-up of coverage from that trip, along with some images that didn’t make it to full-blown articles but that I wanted to share.  As always, I welcome your feedback (comments, emails, tweets, fb messages, carrier pigeon…) on what you liked/loathed/loved about the coverage!  

Enjoy!…

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“This…. this was all vineyards of Malbec…”

They say the Italian influence runs strong in Argentina, and nowhere does it look stronger than in the face of our driver, Carlos Tizio Mayer – Plump, Roman-nosed and topped with a wavy shock of grey hair, he could be any of a dozen Italian uncles plucked straight from of the memories of my youth growing up in Wilmington’s “Little Italy.”  He is driving with one hand, and waving to articulate his words with the other (as they saying goes, if you want to get an Italian to stop talking, hold down his hands).  He’s waving towards the South American urban sprawl passing through the view from my passenger-side window.

Even his cadence seems Italian – or, I should say eeeeee-TAL-haaaaahn – deliberate, slow, and almost bearing a sing-song quality.  I have plenty of time to consider the nuances, as Carlos is talking nearly non-stop during a two hour pickup truck ride (with me, uncomfortably, in the back “seat”) from downtown Mendoza to the small town of Vista Flores, home to the winemaking properties of Clos de los Siete, and the vineyards which Carlos maintains as their General Manager.

Carlos is holding court with his captive audience during our drive, but I’m only paying half attention.  For one, Argentina’s roads aren’t exactly conducive to legible pen-and-paper note-taking; for another, I’m having a hard time keeping my eyes off of the view to our west, where Tupungato, the massive Pleistocene-era statovolcano, is also holding court. Tupungato is a giant among giants, towering over most of its Andean neighbors in a stunning, unmoving testament to the immense pyroclastic forces that, an immense amount of time ago, poleaxed an equally-immense stretch of land between what is now Chile and Argentina.

While I stare out the window waiting for the morning sun to get high enough to change the snow-capped peaks from auburn to bright white, Carlos continues without pause his history lesson of Argentine grapegrowing.

“We had fifty thousand hectares, now, it’s about thirty thousand” he says.  The vineyard plantings around Mendoza gave way to sprawl in the 1980s, when local consumer tastes changed.  Domestic per capita wine consumption here in the last twenty-five years has decreased from eighty liters a year to “less than thirty.  The younger generation is drinking soda… and beer.”…

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