2017 El Enemigo Chardonnay, Mendoza

El Enemigo Chardonnay is one of Argentina's most popular white wines - with good reason! The wine has dominated the top of the chart from critics for many years in a row, and it is praised to the skies for its high quality, complex nuances and great price. In 2019, James Suckling named El Enemigo Chardonnay the 6th best wine in Argentina (out of 1800 wines tasted) with a score of 98P! This must be said to be a manifestation of the enormous quality that the winemaker from Catena, Alejandro Virgil, has managed to get out of the hand-harvested grapes from Mendoza. The grapes for El Enemigo Chardonnay come from high-altitude vineyards in Lújan de Cuyo, considered one of Mendoza's best wine regions, located 1000 metres above sea level. El Enemigo is a joint venture between Adrianna Catena (youngest daughter of Nicolas and Elena Catena) and Alejandro Virgil, who is Chief Winemaker at Bodega Catena Zapata, Argentina's No. 1 producer of quality wines. Adrianna is a historian and Alejandro is a winemaker. Together, they both wanted to go back in time to when the first European immigrants came to Mendoza, and sought to make wines of the same high, or better quality than back home in Europe. The wines are quite different from Catena Zapata, where Alejandro especially tries to promote the minerality of each wine. This Chardonnay from the El Enemigo range has a broad flavour of ripe citrus, apple, melon and butter in the flavour. The nose is marked by light spices combined with rich and well-integrated hints of vanilla from the French oak barrels. The wine has a long, creamy and mineral finish. The colour is straw-gold from the long barrel ageing in French oak barrels. A superb Chardonnay from El Enemigo.