Boom Underwritten By Slow Catastrophe
TASTING NOTES:
- Color: Ruby red with violet hues
- Taste: Pinot Noir with great character, notes of raspberries and cherries combined with herbs such as oregano, thyme, truffle and flowers. Great complexity and finesse in this splendid Patagonian wine.
- Palate: Delicate and persistent structure. Silky tannins, combined with a firm natural acidity, that gives a unique vitality and depth. Of medium intensity, its great characteristics are finesse and complexity." (AbV 12.5%, pH 3.42)
VARIETALS: 100% Pinot Noir
BARRELS: Untoasted French oak foudres
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Parallel 45’33, the latitude Otronia sits on — which also cuts through Bordeaux, Oregon’s Willamette Valley, and the northern coast of Maine.
Maine gets overlooked in the American wine conversation, obviously, because Maine’s wine contribution is mostly blueberries and stubbornness. But parallel 45 running through Maine means it also runs through the Gulf of Maine, which is one of the fastest-warming bodies of water on the planet. Scientists have been watching it heat up at roughly four times the global average rate, and the lobster industry — Maine’s crown jewel, the thing on every license plate and dish towel — has been scrambling to figure out what that means. Right now it means more lobsters, actually, at least for the moment, because warming waters have been great for lobster reproduction and terrible for their traditional predators. Abundance born from disruption. A boom underwritten by a slow catastrophe.
Which, again, has nothing to do with Otronia, except that Otronia is also doing something improbable at a latitude where improbable things apparently happen. Patagonian parallel 45 brings permanent winds, brutal cold, and soils that seem almost aggressively indifferent to the idea of viticulture. The winery’s own tagline is “at the edge of the impossible,” and you get the sense they mean that literally. Lobstermen off the coast of Portland would understand the energy completely: you plant your traps, or your vines, somewhere the conditions seem almost hostile, and then you just see what the place gives you.
