Paul Hobbs is one of the most celebrated and influential winemakers in the world — a Californian with a Burgundian soul whose work in Argentina, beginning in the 1990s when Mendoza was still finding its international voice, helped define what Argentine Malbec could be at its finest and most ambitious. Viña Cobos is his Argentine masterpiece: an estate in the Luján de Cuyo sub-region of Mendoza that has become one of the country’s most revered and sought-after producers, making wines that combine the power and concentration of the high-altitude Andean terroir with the precision, elegance, and restraint of a winemaker who learned his craft in the great cellars of Burgundy and Bordeaux. Bramare — “to yearn for” in old Italian — is the name given to Viña Cobos’s most expressive and terroir-driven range: wines that yearn to express the full character and complexity of their specific Mendoza origins, and that do so with a completeness and conviction that sets them apart from almost everything else in Argentine wine. Luján de Cuyo is Mendoza’s most prestigious and historically celebrated wine sub-region — the original heartland of Argentine Malbec, where the combination of altitude, ancient alluvial soils, and the intense Andean sunshine produces wines of a depth, structure, and aromatic complexity that have made it the benchmark against which all other Argentine Malbec is measured. The 2022 Bramare is a wine of extraordinary presence and refinement: the deep, inky colour and the intense dark fruit aromatics of great Malbec — blackberry, plum, dark chocolate — with the floral violet note that is the variety’s most distinctive and beguiling signature, and a structure, precision, and length on the palate that speaks directly of Paul Hobbs’s winemaking philosophy and the extraordinary quality of the Luján de Cuyo terroir. A wine of genuine ambition and real beauty.