Ruta 22 Malbec

Wine: Ruta 22 Malbec.

Grape: malbec

Region: Neuquen Valley, Patagonia, Argentina

Vintage: 2010

Price: $7.99

In the glass: Ruta 22 Malbec is a highly concentrated purplish-red color with an opaque core going out into a fine violet rim definition and showing high viscosity.

On the nose: It is all dark fruits with plums, cherries, blueberries and sloe dominating. It also has wood, vanilla and spice components from the barrels it has been aged in, as well as underlying hints of fruit-driven minerality and sweet chewing tobacco.

On the palate: It is a big, mouth-filling, full-bodied wine with loads of extraction of black fruit dominated by black plums, crushed wild cherries, acai, pomegranate and huckleberries. The midpalate is rich and rounded with rather supple tannins and good delineation going into an anise-charged finish and just lingering hints of black licorice and ground pepper.

Odds and ends: Ruta 22 is the name of the main road used to travel between east and west in Argentina, but this wine is coming from one of the wildest and most unforgiving territories on the planet, the southernmost tip of Argentina (and Chile), as well as South America itself, named Patagonia. Argentina is without question the champion of malbec wines. While originally a Bordeaux grape variety indigenous to that region of France, it was "adopted" about 150 years ago when French immigrants brought it to Argentina. This variety really thrived, mainly in the fertile Mendoza region. It became the predominant grape variety and really the "signature" of the entire Argentinean wine industry over the following century. Patagonia is a climate that is very dry and can have quite dramatic temperature swings, so one must imagine that grapes grown there have to be sturdy and produce some fairly concentrated juice. It is a different and perhaps more true to the original malbec that is found in Ruta 22 wine. This is from a great vintage, too, so it will drink well through 2015 at least.

Gil Lempert-Schwarz's wine column appears Wednesdays. Write him at P.O. Box 50749, Henderson, NV 89106-0749, or email him at gil@winevegas.com.