Trapiche Broquel Pinot Noir

Wine: Trapiche Broquel Pinot Noir.

Grape: Pinot noir

Region: Mendoza, Argentina

Vintage: 2009

Price: $9.99

In the glass: Trapiche Broquel Pinot Noir is a deep ruby red with a semi-opaque crimson core and a purplish rim definition with high viscosity.

On the nose: The wine comes right at the olfactory sensors with an onslaught of deeply concentrated cherry fruit, blackberry juice, boysenberry sorbet, creamy vanilla notes, creme de cassis, smoke, phenol and warm buttery minerals.

On the palate: Trapiche Broquel Pinot Noir elopes with your taste buds, producing massive, rich extracted black fruit concentrate with crushed ripe blackberries, black licorice, wild black cherries, toast points, spicy underlying minerals and sloe juice. It has a well-defined midpalate that is rich with vanilla and black fruit, going into a solid and concentrated finish, loaded with licorice root and zesty minerals. This is a tasty and great example of a distinctly New World pinot noir, with little relation to its Burgundian cousins on account of the much higher alcohol, extract of fruit and missing finesse of the original grape variety.

Odds and ends: Who would have thought that they would be making pinot noir wines in Argentina, which is commonly known for its big, brawny malbecs and the concentrated tannat-based wines? But, it is now known that the pinot noir grape varietal has the highest concentration of super-antioxidant polyphenols and its compound rasveratrol, of any known grape variety. What that means is that it is technically more beneficial to drink pinot noir-based wines than, say cabernet sauvignon or merlot, and you get a higher anti-aging effect from pinot in a relative sense. So, Trapiche has successfully managed to come up with this wine, which could be called "Pinot Noir on Steroids," and named it Broquel, which means "shield," alluding to a family heritage. While I would normally recommend this type of wine for salmon or chicken, this one needs a big, juicy steak with roasted potatoes. Drink this pinot noir now through 2014.

Gil Lempert-Schwarz's wine column appears Wednesdays. Write him at P.O. Box 50749, Henderson, NV 89016-0749, or e-mail him at gil@winevegas.com.