There’s something exciting happening at Château Cheval Blanc’s outpost in the Andes. Ahead of the release of 2021 Cheval des Andes as part of our La Place de Bordeaux offer, Charlie Geoghegan finds out more.

“Cheval des Andes is not a traditional Argentinian wine, and it’s not what it was 15 years ago.”

So says Arnaud de Laforcade, financial and commercial director at Château Cheval Blanc – and this, its sibling estate on the other side of the world. He is at No.3 St James’s Street to show us the new 2021 vintage, about to be released through La Place de Bordeaux.

Founded as a joint venture between Cheval Blanc and the Mendoza-based Terrazas de los Andes in 1998, Cheval des Andes has undergone a transformation over the last decade or so.

The estate has 47 hectares of vines, split between two of Mendoza’s most prized areas: Las Compuertas, part of Luján de Cuyo; and a smaller share in Paraje Altamira in the Uco Valley. But until 2014, the wine itself was produced from a broader selection of vines, including some of Terrazas’s best parcels.

Then something changed.

From brand to land

The early 2010s saw greater involvement here from “the new generation at Cheval Blanc”, including Arnaud and his colleague Pierre-Olivier Clouet, technical director-turned-CEO. Things got a little philosophical, and they began to wonder what a joint venture should, or could, be.

Cheval des Andes was a blended wine, assembled with care and precision like a fine Champagne. But this was not the Cheval Blanc team’s forte. “Why would we have any legitimacy in blending in Argentina?” they asked themselves. “We don’t know anything about blends.”

Back in St Emilion, Cheval Blanc is, of course, a blend – of grape varieties and parcels. But the approach to blending there is deceptively simple – and just a little bit radical. Rather than starting with a blank slate and building up, “it’s just taking away the weak plots,” Arnaud says.

It reminds me of marking in the French education system; as friends have described it, the student starts with a possible 20 marks out of 20, and it’s the teacher’s job to remove points from the maximum rather than the inverse.

Pierre-Olivier Clouet once told me that he would use 100% of the grapes at Cheval Blanc for the grand vin there if he could, if the quality allowed. A good vintage in his mind is one where everything is so high in quality that there is simply no second wine. He gets his way sometimes, as he did in 2015 and 2022.

They can afford to do this at Cheval Blanc because the wine comes from a specific place that they know intimately, and over which they have total control. Things operated a little differently at Cheval des Andes, calling for a change – “going from a brand to a growth,” Arnaud says.

A change of pace

And so, with the 2015 vintage, those 47 hectares became the sole grape source for Cheval des Andes. In tandem came a wholesale reconsidering of the vineyard: replanting where necessary and questioning established practices on pruning and picking.

These developments came at a welcome change of pace from Arnaud’s home patch. “In St Emilion, everything moves slowly,” he laments. “In Argentina, there’s a sense of freedom. If you want to change your harvest date, you can.” So they did.

In the past, harvest at Cheval des Andes took place in early May. Now, it’s in early March or even the end of February; it was 4th-19th March in 2021.

You may be able to move fast in Argentina, but that doesn’t mean you do so recklessly. The decision to pick early needs to be made well before harvest, at the beginning of the season. “To have balanced grapes,” Arnaud says, “you need to tell the vines you’ll be picking early.”

Some people will tell you that there’s little to no vintage variation in Argentina. The vagaries of one year, the logic goes, are not all that different from the next – and the impact on the wine is minimal, in any event. Arnaud is not so sure. It may ring true, he says, for those wines where oak and extraction play the key role. Strip out the heavy winemaking hand, though, and you might be surprised: “Start picking earlier, stop all the new oak, increase the size of the ageing vessels and you leave room for nuance, for a more delicate expression of the vintage effect.”

There is one area in which Cheval des Andes sees very little variation: the size of the crop. Cheval Blanc is a not incomparable 39 hectares of vines, though the yield there can vary widely, Arnaud says: “100,000 bottles one year, 40,000 the next.” At Cheval des Andes, they see a far steadier 90-120,000 bottles each year. Arnaud puts this down to the water supply.

The climate in Mendoza is too dry to viably grow grapes without irrigation, he says. Though not permitted in Bordeaux, irrigation is a fact of viticultural life here. Improvements in irrigation at the estate, including the installation of a reservoir and the sparing, targeted approach of drip irrigation (as opposed to the more one-size-fits-all flood irrigation) have helped enormously. Irrigating only when and specifically where it is necessary to do so has given them steadier yields – and a huge improvement in the ripeness level of the Cabernet Sauvignon.

The Bordeaux influence

There is a clear Bordelais influence here – in the approach and in the final wine. Cheval des Andes was conceived in part by Pierre Lurton, among the most significant figures of his generation in Bordeaux. Today it’s overseen by the uber-talented Pierre-Olivier Clouet and Gérald Gabillet, in partnership with the local team.

If you tasted it blind and thought it was a Bordeaux, you could be forgiven. The tannins are refined, there’s a Cabernet-derived leafy note, there’s plenty of spice – and there’s balance. This is a harmonious wine from the off; tasting Cheval des Andes, even the just-released 2021 vintage, is never hard work.

But there’s more to it. This is not just another Bordeaux blend from Argentina, nor is it purely a Cheval Blanc lookalike. The not-so-secret ingredient here is Malbec. Argentinian Malbec is ubiquitous now on supermarket shelves, but the grape itself is native to the South West of France (Cahors rather than nearby Bordeaux, but close enough). It was a significant presence in Bordeaux until Phylloxera and, later, frosts, all but wiped it out. It remains on the books today as a permitted grape for red Bordeaux, though plantings are minuscule. There is, notably, half a hectare of Malbec now planted at Cheval Blanc; watch this space.

The Malbec at Cheval des Andes hits a bit different, though. Malbec makes up just under half the blend in 2021, alongside 49% Cabernet Sauvignon and 3% Petit Verdot. There’s more to Malbec than the over-ripe fruit bomb for which it is sometimes disparaged, Arnaud believes. He likens it, to my surprise, to Pinot Noir: “Earthy, gently floral, relatively low tannins, and a good balance between alcohol and acidity.”

Put it all together, and there’s something very exciting happening at Cheval des Andes. The 2021 is not overly showy at this early stage, more delicate and reserved. But there is a great deal of complexity when you go looking for it. There is beautifully pure fruit, with nicely defined blackberry coulis and blueberry notes, along with dusty dark chocolate and cocoa-powder character. It’s all a bit tightly coiled for now, but there’s spicy black fruit and tobacco ready to reveal itself. An underlying spicy edge is peeking out, though that fruit stands out above all. Fine tannins and lively acidity indicate a bright future.

The 2021 vintage of Cheval des Andes is available on bbr.com.