Algodon Wine is on the right track!

Happy New Year once again, everyone.  I hope your celebrations were enjoyable.

After a recent private tasting, our wine advisor and Master of Wine Anthony Foster shared with us his personal thoughts on our latest 2008 and 2009 vintages.  He says we have some real potential with this year’s vintages, and that some of our wines are “real stars”.  He even recommends submitting two or three of them to international wine competitions in the future, as he feels confident that they will garner accolades.

Here is a preview of our 2008 label designs.  They look great!

We are also all very happy with the hiring of our new wine advisor, Marcelo Pelleriti.  Marcelo recently earned 98 point ratings for wines with which he was associated with (Chateau La Violette and Chateau Le Gay) from Robert Parker's The Wine Advocate.  Marcelo will join our wine panel in the planning and execution of the betterment of our vineyards, harvest and winemaking.

We are on the right track!

-Scott Mathis

Argentine Interview, AM Update, More Media, and Wine News…

I hope everyone had a memorable Memorial Day weekend! For those Spanish speakers (or Google Translate aficionados) check out our interview with Los Andes online published this week (the interview can also be found at AreadelVino.com). Los Andes newspaper is a huge publication, analogous to the New York Times of Mendoza. In the interview we discuss among other things our Algodon Wine, a bit of our history, and the fact that we’ve already invested approximately $25 million in our Argentine properties. The interviewer also touches on the world-wide economic downturn and its effect on real estate developments. I have always been very clear about my optimism regarding the future of Argentine real estate, and that I believe in the importance of diversifying personal investments outside of the U.S. economy and the U.S. dollar. In one of my favorite exchanges, the interviewer asks to what extent our Argentine developments have been affected by the economic crisis:

Question: Did you have to lay off any staff due to the (economic) crisis? Answer: Actually we hired nine people in Buenos Aires for the mansion; a luxury hotel with a restaurant, bar, and wine cave- and two others for the hotel in Mendoza.

Gerhard Heusch emailed me this morning and once again confirmed that the scheduled Algodon Mansion opening date is still intact. They’re working very hard down there, and the work is going fast!

Algodon Wine Estates gets a tremendous write-up from Jim Bryant for Chicago’s (metro area) “Quintessential Barrington” lifestyle magazine. Mr. Bryant’s glowing descriptions of our estate, our wine, our amenities, and San Rafael- go beyond terrific. He also very favorably mentions our partners at Bombal & Aldao and Finca los Alamos.

In other wine news, The LA Times published an interesting article titled Findings of wine contest study hard for critics to swallow. From the article; “…consumers should not always assume that gold medal winners are outstanding wines…retired Cal State Humboldt professor Robert Hodgson said he looked at the results for more than 4,000 wines entered in 13 U.S. competitions in 2003 and found little consistency in what wines won gold medals.” Our Master of Wine, Antony Foster, followed up on this in an email to me. For the most part, he indicated that he’s in agreement with the article, and that he thinks it would be in our best interest to enter our wines in reputable competitions run under international rules. Good advice.

--Scott Mathis