Since 1902, the Zapata family has owned and operated the Bodega Catena Zapata Winery. It started as a sleepy operation making wines aimed at local tastes. Then the third generation leader, Nicolás Catena Zapata took the reins.
Nicolás has a doctorate in Economics and was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley where he met Robert Mondavi and several other California winemakers. He then applied what he learned in California to the family business back home in Mendoza, Argentina. Since then, he has become one of Argentina’s most outspoken wine heroes.
Catena makes some wonderful wines, but it is a family business, after all. So no one was surprised when Nicolás’s daughter, Laura, was interested in making some wine. Massive brain power clearly runs in the family. Laura has graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard, then got a medical degree from Stanford! Besides making wine, she is also an emergency room doctor practicing in San Francisco.
All that is great, but how does she rank as a winemaker? La Posta is the name of her winery and she has decided to make several single-vineyard Malbecs, but keep the price a low $18. My favorite of the bunch is the Pizzella, made entirely of grapes grown by the Pizzella family in Altamira, part of the La Consulta region of the Uco Valley. The wine has extraordinary depth and length of flavor, with a heavy emphasis on dark berries and plums. If you like wild game, this is your wine. Its impressive fruit would also marry up nicely with Italian meat dishes. It is, however, a quintessentially Argentine wine, so the best advice is, do what the natives do: Have it with a piping hot platter of your favorite grilled meats.
This article appears in July 20 • 2018.
