Morrisons, The Best Gran Montaña Reserve Malbec, Uco Valley, Mendoza 2020 (14%)

£8

Three of the four Argentinian wines winning their way through to Best in Show this year come from Uco, this splendid Malbec among them, underscoring the colossal potential on offer here. As with its peers, this wine is a dense, opaque purple-black-red in colour with huge saturation on the sides of the glass after a swirl. It’s opulently fruity, too, with billowing damson and sloe pointed up by notes of tea leaf and rose. You might, from the aromas, be expecting a fruit bomb – but this is purer, finer and fresher than that, with ample sinew, sap and ripely leafy inner freshness. Can anywhere in the world compete with red-wine value of this order at present?

Created for Morrisons by one of Argentina’s elite producers, Zuccardi, this is a pure, undiluted Malbec that’s born of 15-year-old vines planted in Uco Valley, to the south of Mendoza city, the vineyards sitting at 945m-1,402m above sea level.

Established in 1963, Zuccardi has always pushed boundaries and constantly been at the forefront of Argentinian viticulture, and it’s this distinction which so caught the eye of the UK supermarket chain.

‘Zuccardi has been pioneering in its approach in the Uco Valley,’ says Morrisons’ wine sourcing manager Charles Cutteridge. ‘We wanted to create a wine that is driven by a sense of place and terroir; a wine that is distinctively Argentinian with an identity which comes from the soils and vineyards the fruit is grown in. This is why we partnered with Zuccardi, which uses oak sparingly and focuses on neutral materials such as concrete to create wines with excellent purity of fruit not masked by lots of oak. We believe that quality comes through in this wine.’

Crafted from entirely handpicked grapes, Morrisons’ award winner was fermented using wild yeasts with a proportion of the wine being aged in French oak barrels.