Altos Las Hormigas, Blanco Mendoza 2021

91 points Tim Atkin, MW
"Marrying Chenin Blanc with 44% Semillón – two varieties that have a long history in Argentina – this is a partially skin-fermented white with plenty of structure and depth, showing characters of quince, honeysuckle and hay and a fresh, palate-cleansing finish."

Vinous Reverie Notes
Wine from Mendoza is more than just Malbec: it is the reflection of know-how, a tradition and an origin. Founded in 1995 by a consortium of prominent Italian winemakers, including Alberto Antonini of Antinori and Antonio Morescalchi, Altos Las Hormigas has always been evolving. Their Terroir Project is working towards the creation of an appellation system in Mendoza. Altos Las Hormigas teamed up over the past decade with Pedro Parra, PhD in Terroir, to use various techniques to find both the ideal sites for their wines as well as a way to measure the ideal ripeness of their fruit. With Parra’s guidance, they have dug over 1,500 soil pits in the Uco Valley, chasing the chalky Mendoza gold that is limestone, which imparts a beautiful minerality to their wines. In Gualtallary, Altamira, and Vista Flores, they have found the limestone trail, where the vineyards have shallow topsoil, and the vines dive deep into the calcareous mother rock. They also use electromagnetism to map out the soil depth of their vineyard sites so that they can avoid picking a whole block where, due to the warm and hilly vineyards of Mendoza, there may be some underripe and overripe grapes in addition to the ideally ripe grapes. Instead, they use that information to harvest in irregular polygons, and pick the fruit with ideal ripeness in every section. All this obsession just to create a great bottle of wine.