One of the truly fun and fascinating things about wine is finding a little-known grape variety from which a superb wine has been made and then finding another equally astounding wine made with the same grapes grown halfway around the world — in a country that most of us didn’t know made wines of substance.
That’s the story of two wines, both made with a grape called tannat. The first is French, and it is grown in a tiny wine region in southwestern France called Madiran, next to Armagnac, the area where fine spirits of the same name are made.
Tannat grapes produce a deep-purple wine that’s very rough and tannic when first pressed. It takes a minimum of 20 months in the barrels for tannat wine to soften enough and become drinkable. Sometimes Madiran wines are blended with merlot or cabernet sauvignon to give them more elegance and finesse. Yet these wines are very distinctly different from their Bordeaux counterparts. The first wine from the Madiran is a 2003 Chateau Montus ($28), which is available fairly widely in better Detroit-area wine shops. It has good structure and acidity, and shows blueberry and dark, dry cherry notes in the mouth, punctuated with a long, lingering aftertaste.
The second wine, from Uruguay, is a 2004 Bouza Tannat ($25). What’s not well known is that Uruguay has an established wine industry that ranks fourth in volume of winemaking in South America. The acreage of tannat planted in Uruguay (where it’s called harriague) has now surpassed the number of acres planted in France. Uruguay also grows chardonnay, pinot blanc, sauvignon blanc, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and cabernet franc.
Bouza Tannat is lighter and sleeker than its French counterpart, but impeccably made and much more intriguing because of its characteristics. For example, it’s aromatically floral, slightly lilac. In the mouth, the wine is fairly aggressive and layered, with licorice and tobacco notes. The structure is firm from front palate to back palate. And while the Montus still has a roughness that it will shed over the year, the Bouza has none of it.
In most ways, the Uruguayan wine could be said to be smaller-boned and like a thoroughbred. The French version is more of a solid, tough quarter horse. Both good, each different.
In one way, this is very much the same relationship that developed between France and Argentina over the malbec grape, which was also from southwestern France, but produced much different, and in some ways, more evolved wines in Argentina.
The travels of tannat, it is believed, may have begun in a nearby area to Madiran populated by the French Basque shepherds and farmers who speak their own language and use tannat also, but under a different name. Some Basques migrated to Uruguay many years ago and are said to be the source of the tannat grape used there.
If the quality of this tannat is any indication of what else might be hiding in Uruguay, watch out. It could be a very interesting sign of a new wine region about to emerge.
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