2018 Tabali Malbec Roca Madre Limari Valley 750 ml

Winning the status of Chile’s #1 red wine means taking down some titans.

It means not only vanquishing long-reigning legends like Almaviva, Clos Apalta, and Seña, but out-valuing a legion of overperforming Cabernets and Pinot Noirs—and in 2018, the dazzlingly opulent tour-de-force Tabali Malbec Roca Madre pulled it off.

“My best Chilean red wine of the year is a Malbec—and not just any Malbec,” wrote critic Tim Atkin in his 98-point review of the Roca Madre, which he called “an incredible world-class red.”

Atkin wasn’t alone. “I was blown away,” is how the Wine Advocate review for this “juicy and hedonistic” red begins.

When Tabali got its start in Limarí Valley in the early 2000s, there were no vineyards there, just pastures, scrubland, and the inhospitable slopes of the Andes Mountains. Other winemakers might have been put off by the rugged conditions of the area just west of the Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar desert on Earth.

But the Tabali team, whose winemaking efforts were led by Felipe Müller, were undaunted by the harsh terrain. They scoured the region’s forbidding landscape for the terroir that seemed most promising—and that led them over 5,000 feet up a mountain, to a vineyard called Rio Hurtado.

At 5,249 feet in elevation—the height of five Eiffel towers!—it’s located just under the snowcaps of the Andean foothills, where temperatures can ping-pong 40 degrees or more within a day. The east-facing orientation of the slope means it sees sun only in the morning and early afternoon, leading to that drastic temperature variation.

It’s a place of high drama and exhilarating beauty—traits evoked in every sip of this Chilean red masterpiece.