The Elusive 100 Pt Wine.
In the discussions I have had with well-heeled sommeliers, the topic of wine ratings often comes up.
Usually, they are not very interested in chasing points. They want to taste the wine. You can tell they have suspicions about the integrity of ratings assigned to various wines, and many prefer blind tastings without the bias of the label.
It is a Catch-22. You would love not to worry about ratings, but when you are a small producer like us, few things get the ball rolling in the wine world like a 90-plus-point score. We need highly rated wines to establish ourselves as a producer of quality wine.
So how do you achieve that?
It is not enough to enter a competition like Guarda14 in Mendoza. It is a serious blind tasting with hundreds of entries, judged by trained sommeliers and enology experts, many of whom are part of Argentina's wine community. We have achieved two Gold Medal wines in successive years, and the jury was surprised to realize they had awarded a small boutique vineyard that was previously unknown to them.
If your goal is to make a wine that can stand with the best in the world, who do you learn from?
For us, one answer was Marcelo Pelleriti. In 2010, Marcelo became the first Argentine winemaker to receive 100 points from Robert Parker, for a French wine: Chateau La Violette 2010, a Merlot from Pomerol. The milestone matters because it shows what he has learned across Mendoza and Bordeaux, not because the score is the whole point.
We wanted to embrace his methods and learn from him how to produce outstanding wines. Marcelo Pelleriti (@MarcePelleriti) started making wine as a child and later became known for his work at Bodega Monteviejo in the Clos de los Siete project in the Uco Valley, while also working in Pomerol under Michel Rolland's mentorship.
Marcelo is also a musician, a guitarist, and while he is passionate about music, he is even more passionate about making great wine.
He is known for microvinification, also called integral vinification: fermenting small, carefully selected lots in oak barrels. It is a very labor-intensive process.
The process requires tools to punch down the must and roll the barrels during fermentation. At the end, the barrels need to be disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled. 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 this to 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, because 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 are excited.
