Caro 2019 150cl

Chocolatey, cedary oak with truffles and tobacco here. While there is a lot of oak to flatter at this stage, it still delivers restraint, bearing and class. Keep smelling and you'll find scented, dark lead pencil, meaty spices, fine blackberries and a hint of tar. Ripe and rich, but nuanced, with more complexity that takes time to fully uncoil. Really silky, precise and polished tannins, loaded with some fruit sweetness on the palate, then extending to the finish that lasts a minute. Drinkable now, but better to hold.

The serious, balanced and quite complete 2019 Caro was made with 64% Malbec and 36% Cabernet Sauvignon and produced in a classical style. It's a wine with ripeness, Mendoza sun and Bordeaux elegance and subtleness. It feels harmonious and integrated, with 14.5% alcohol and good balancing freshness. It matured in French barriques and 4,200-liter oak foudre for 14 months, which was a shorter élevage and using larger-volume containers to achieve neatly integrated oak. It's complex, clean and elegant, and the palate reveals a velvety texture with juicy fruit and round tannins. 31,400 bottles and 1,280 magnums were produced. It was bottled in October 2021. It's one of the finest vintages of Caro and should develop nicely in bottle.

Elegantly styled, with lovely notes of plumeria and cocoa nibs clinging to lush blackberry and cherry flavors, which are buoyed by fresh acidity midpalate and fan out around fine tannins. Ends with notes of slate and spice. Malbec and Cabernet Sauvignon. Drink now through 2032.