Last week, I wrote about four great wines being released by the excellent Chilean winery, Vina Perez Cruz. There is only one catch: their best wine of all isn’t available in at the LCBO. It is made in such limited quantities that the only way to get your hands on a bottle is by ordering it from Charton Hobbs, the wine agent that imports Perez Cruz into Canada. Wine agents are an interesting and little understood phenomenon. Operating in a strange public-private partnership with the liquor board, they fulfill a number of roles: scouring the world for rising stars; importing wine to be sold in LCBO outlets; directly supplying restaurants with other wines; and finally offering special orders to individual consumers. As a manager at the Lifford Wine Agency recently said to me, special orders from a wine agent have one big advantage: you can find bottles so rare that they fly under the radar of our government monopoly.Vina Perez Cruz’s gold medal winning 2005 Liguai ($45) is just such a rare bird. It’s such an outrageously bizarre wine, I find it hard to describe without slipping into pleonastic apocolypticisms. It is almost bible black in the glass with just a faint halo of blood red. The bouquet hits you with aromas of wet grass and fecund vegetation, like a jungle climbing into an abandoned city. Beneath the herbs, there’s an undertow of black leather, rubber and a hint of cold cream, evolving over time into more edible flavours like chocolate and plum pudding. It’s not merely complex: it is an ecosystem. And this is just the nose. On the palate, Syrah, Carmenere and Cabernet Sauvignon are combined into an inky thickness and density. The predominating note is blackberry nectar, but there’s some cedar and tar singing back-up. The heavy fruit is balanced against the tannins and surprisingly refreshing acids. It is a fat, powerful and rich wine – and it will only get better with time.
Apparently “Liguai” means “guess what?” in the Mapuche language. That’s a good name for this wine, since it doesn’t taste like anything else. It’s not for the faint at heart, but it will give a lot of pleasure to anyone who likes to take their taste buds for a walk on the wild side. If this description sounds intriguing, you may want to act fast. The last I heard from Charton Hobbs, there were only 150 bottles headed to Toronto, to be sold in cases of six bottles each. I guess that’s the problem with rare birds: in a moment they are gone.
Matthew Sullivan is a lawyer with the Department of Justice in Toronto. He writes a weekly blog entry here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca