El Peral IG

El Peral is young. INV Resolution 1/2022 was signed on 14 September 2022 and published in the Boletín Oficial in January 2023. Chandon started the project in 2019, finished the soil studies at the end of 2020 and filed in October 2021 with a technical report and a climate study. It worked with the agronomy faculty of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo and put together ten years of weather data.

The resolution itself gives no altitude or soil figures, so those come from producers. Chandon's Caicayén estate, at 1,250 metres, is the lowest in the district, and Chandon arrived there in 1995. Cepas del Plata, at 1,550 metres, got its first vines in 2006. Zuccardi describes heterogeneous soils of medium depth with layers of small gravel and the odd calcareous coating, a cool microclimate and cold nights. The sources give a 400 metre spread between the lowest and highest vineyards, so I'd expect a Caicayén bottle and a Cepas del Plata bottle to taste different.

I expect a small number of bottles here, and sparkling wine and Chardonnay are where I'd start. I'd want acidity that holds up.