The Elusive 100 Pt Wine.
In the discussions I’ve had with well-heeled sommeliers, the topic has come up about wine ratings.
Usually they weren’t interested, they just wanted to taste the wine. You could tell they had suspicions about the integrity of the ratings assigned to various wines. In fact, there was a preference for blind tastings without the bias of the label.
It's a catch 22. You'd love to not worry about ratings, but unfortunately when you’re a small producer like us, nothing gets the ball rolling in the wine world quite like wines receiving 90-plus-point ratings. We need some highly rated wines to establish ourselves as a producer of quality wine.
How do you achieve that?
It isn’t enough to enter an annual contest like Guarda 14 held in Mendoza every year. It features a blind tasting with over 300 entries from many of Argentina's top brands. Catena always does well, as you would expect. We’ve achieved two Gold Medal wines in successive years. The jury is composed of well-trained sommeliers and enology experts, many of whom are part of Argentina’s wine community and teach at the college level. They were quite surprised to realize they had awarded a small boutique vineyard, previously unknown to them.
If your goal is a 100-point wine, how do you go about achieving that? There has been only one winemaker in South America with a 100-point wine to his credit, and while this wine was produced at his vineyard in France, he set a bar that many are pursuing.
We decided to pursue this winemaker. We wanted to embrace his methods and learn from him how to produce outstanding wines. Marcelo Pelleriti (
@MarcePelleriti
) is that winemaker. He started making wine as a child and achieved fame as the winemaker for Missionviejo. He began there in 2001 under the tutelage of Michel Rolland with his Clos de Siete in Valle de Uco. They still collaborate on projects.
Marcelo is also a musician, a guitarist, and while he’s passionate about music, he’s even more passionate about making great wine. Marcelo developed his own method of fermenting wine in barrels (microvinification or integral vilification), a very labor-intensive process.
For the first ten years, while experimenting and learning, he did this process alone. This required him to develop tools to punch down the must and roll the barrels several times a day during fermentation. At the end of the process, the barrels need to be disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled to be reused for one additional year. Trust me, he is very particular about barrels, and the ones he prefers are more expensive than the usual French oak. The labor cost, the choice of barrels, and the meticulous sorting of grapes make this a much more expensive process. We call it "wine by the maestro.”
As it happened, Marcelo was receptive to our approach and had the time to take on another project. We fully expect that this will be a long-term relationship, as the maestro has much to teach us. He visited our vineyards and bodega and must have liked something that he saw, as he agreed to be our mentor. We are making the necessary accommodations to facilitate his process for what we are currently calling our iconic wine, our Maestro Wine. The 2025 harvest will be the first vintage, and we expect it to be available for sale in 2027.
Stay tuned—this journey is a marathon, not a sprint. We’re excited!
