I’ve been writing about wine for 19 years and have managed to weasel my way into virtually every wine producing country of consequence. Uruguay was not quite The Final Frontier–to quote Captain Kirk–but it was among the handful of countries yet to stamp my passport, so 
naturally I jumped at the chance to travel there last month for a week of tasting.
If you are the type of reader who tries to sniff out a subtext from an introduction, you could be thinking at this point, “Okay, so Franz went to Uruguay as a sort of mopping-up operation for the sake of being thorough, just to be sure that a seemingly third-rate wine country isn’t actually second-rate instead, and now he’s going to deliver a lengthy, damning-by-faint-praise account that basically says that Uruguay has “potential.”
That would be a reasonable guess on your part, but it would be wrong. The upshot about wine from Uruguay is not a matter of “potential” or “promise” but rather of excellence. This excellence is an accomplished fact, and moreover it is an excellence in a distinctive mode–which is a separate point that is as important as the finding of excellence itself.
Uruguay’s wines bear little resemblance to those of Argentina or Chile. They display a stylistic profile all their own, and it is a first-rate profile incorporating moderate ripeness and fresh acidity (as in European wines) but generous fruit and relatively soft structure, as in New World 
wines. Uruguay is home to a truly distinctive terroir that leaves a deeply etched signature on its wines, both white and red, consequently they are as interesting as they are delicious.
How cool is that? Pretty damned cool, and I’ll have a good deal more to say about Uruguay’s wines in my column here on WRO next week. “Uruguay?” was a question posed by two intelligent and well-informed friends from the wine trade when learning of my whereabouts last month, and they’ll get my answer next Wednesday: Uruguay!
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