Bodega Chacra, Pinot Noir “Sin Azufre”

Talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve: One look at this label and you’ll see that, more than anything else about this wine, Piero Incisa della Rocchetta of Bodega Chacra wants you to know it was made without using sulfur. That’s not an easy thing to do—or, rather, it’s not easy to make an un-sulfured wine that is this vivid, this varietally true, this physically sound.The ambition of this wine is to present the most transparent, unadulterated expression of Pinot Noir possible, and it succeeds triumphantly on that front. Despite being a scion of an iconic Italian wine family, Piero found his wine inspiration much further afield, way down near the southern tip of Argentina along Patagonia’s Río Negro. He wasn’t the first person to think of this place as a Pinot paradise—three of the estate’s 24 hectares were first planted in 1932, another seven in 1955—but since founding Chacra in 2004, his wines have put this out-of-the-way appellation on everyone’s radar—including the critics, w