The Wine That Surprised Everyone: Viña Salort Albariño From Uruguay

Every menu change at Nectar involves a tasting session that most guests never know about.

When we are considering a new wine for the list, our supplier brings samples. Several bottles, sometimes more, representing different options across the category we are trying to fill. We open them, we taste them alongside the food they are intended for, and we make a decision. The process is not complicated, but it is never purely internal. We invite guests who are in the bar at the time to taste alongside us, because the people who actually drink the wine on a regular basis are better judges of what should be on the list than any of us sitting behind the bar making decisions in isolation.

When we needed a white wine by the glass that would pair naturally with fish, this is what we did. We set up the samples. We invited the tables to join us. We asked for honest opinions.

The decision was made quickly. Not because the others were bad, but because one wine produced the same reaction from almost every person who tried it: curiosity, then approval, then the question of where it was from.

When we told them Uruguay, the reaction was the same again.

Why Albariño wine from Uruguay is not as surprising as it sounds

Most people who know Albariño know it from Spain, specifically from the Rías Baixas region in Galicia in the far north-west of the country. Galicia is green, wet, and Atlantic-facing, with a maritime climate that gives the wines their characteristic freshness and the saline minerality that makes Albariño one of the most instinctively seafood-friendly white grapes in the world. The grape has tiny, thick skins and thrives in cool coastal climates with Atlantic influence, where the acidity stays high and the citrus and stone fruit character of the grape is preserved rather than cooked out by too much sun.

Uruguay's wine scene has embraced Albariño to the degree that it has become the third most widely planted white grape in the country, eclipsing Chardonnay in popularity. The reason is straightforwardly geographic. Uruguay's Atlantic coastline provides cool breezes and a maritime climate that keep alcohol levels lower and develop bright, fruit-driven wines with great character. The climate is, as Wine Folly describes it, eerily similar to that of the Galician coast. The grape that thrives in north-west Spain thrives in Uruguay for exactly the same reasons, which means the surprise of seeing Uruguay on the label is more about expectation than about the wine itself.

The Viña Salort Albariño comes from the Traversa family, who founded the winery in 1937 when Carlos Domingo Traversa and his wife Maria Josefa Salort, whose name the wine carries, established their 80-hectare vineyard in Paso Cuello in the Canelones region north-west of Montevideo. Three generations across nearly ninety years. The family introduced solar panels in 2014, reduced bottle weights by 25%, and increased composting to replace inorganic fertilisers: the kind of incremental, thoughtful investment in sustainability that a family winery makes when it expects to be producing wine for another three generations.

The blend is 90% Albariño and 10% Chardonnay, which is the detail that surprises people most once they know to look for it. The Chardonnay is not present in a way that announces itself. It adds a slight body and roundness that sits underneath the Albariño's dominant character rather than competing with it, giving the wine a texture that pure Albariño can sometimes lack.

What stainless steel does to a wine

This is the technical decision that most defines the Viña Salort Albariño, and it is worth understanding because it explains the specific character of the wine in the glass.

The grapes are pressed and the resulting must is transported into stainless steel tanks at a temperature between 8 and 12 degrees Celsius, where fermentation proceeds through the addition of selected yeasts. No oak. No barrel contact. No wood of any kind between the grape and the bottle.

The conventional alternative, oak ageing, contributes its own flavour to the wine: vanilla, spice, toast, and a roundness that comes from the micro-oxygenation that happens through the wood. These qualities add complexity but they also change the wine's fundamental character. With Albariño specifically, which is a grape defined by its bright acidity and its direct, clean citrus and stone fruit expression, wood can work but it can also obscure the very qualities that make the grape interesting in the first place.

Steel tank ageing preserves the citrus flavour of the grape rather than adding any wood character. What you are tasting in the Viña Salort is the grape itself, expressed as cleanly and as directly as possible. The racier, more precise quality that stainless steel produces, what Chris described as steely rather than deep, is the result of this choice: the wine has a brightness and a snap to it that a barrel-aged version of the same grape would not have.

This is why the wine works so well at Nectar specifically. The food that comes out of Margarita's kitchen is built on freshness and restraint. The sea bass, the prawns in tomato sauce, the lighter dishes from the vegetable sides: all of them are best alongside a wine that enhances rather than competes, that brings acidity and freshness to the table without introducing an additional layer of flavour complexity on top of food that is already precisely calibrated. Stainless steel Albariño from Uruguay is, it turns out, exactly that wine.

What is in the glass

The tasting note is classically Albariño: herbal notes intertwined with stone fruits and citrus on the nose, textural and rounded on the palate with a little grip on the finish and rich, flavoursome fruit cut through with refreshing acidity.

The acidity is the defining quality. Albariño has high acidity that gives it a mouthwatering, tongue-tingling freshness. The nose delivers citrus first, lime and lemon zest, followed by white peach, and sometimes a hint of white blossom. In the Viña Salort specifically, the stone fruit comes through clearly alongside a slight herbaceous quality that gives it more complexity than a purely fruit-forward wine would have. The finish is clean, slightly saline, and refreshing in the specific way that wines from Atlantic coastlines tend to be: they taste like somewhere that is near the sea.

It is not a wine that asks you to sit and think about it. It is a wine that makes you want to order food and eat it quickly while the glass is still cold, which is the highest possible compliment you can give a wine intended for exactly that purpose.

How we chose it and why that matters

The story of how this wine ended up on the list is the thing I find most satisfying about it.

We did not choose the Viña Salort Albariño because a distributor told us it was the right wine, or because we read about it in a trade publication, or because it had the right price point and the right story on the label. We chose it because we opened a bottle in front of our guests, watched them taste it, and listened to what they said.

What they said, almost universally, was that it tasted different to the others in a way they found interesting rather than just better in a way they could explain. The Albariño character was familiar enough to be approachable. The Uruguay origin was unfamiliar enough to generate the kind of curiosity that makes someone ask the question, which is the question that then leads to the conversation about the grape, the region, the family who has been making the wine for three generations, and why a wine from South America ended up on the list at a Greek-Mediterranean bar on Broughton Street.

That conversation happens regularly. It is one of the more enjoyable ones we have at the bar.

The bestseller

Since the Viña Salort Albariño went on the menu it has become our bestselling wine by a significant margin, which is a result that the tasting session suggested but that I will admit was more complete than I expected. Tables that order a bottle tend to order another before the evening is finished. Groups that come in for fish tend to order it before we have finished describing the menu.

The grape draws attention. The taste is what makes people come back to it, and come back to it, and come back to it again.

Drink it alongside the sea bass or the prawns in tomato sauce for the most direct expression of why it is on the list. Or alongside the halloumi, where the acidity of the wine does something interesting alongside the salt of the cheese. Or alongside almost anything, because the honest answer is that clean, precise, stainless-steel Albariño from a family winery in Uruguay suits most of what comes out of a Mediterranean kitchen.

The guests chose it. They were right.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and try the Viña Salort Albariño.

Tuesday to Thursday: 5pm to 11pm Friday: 5pm to 1am Saturday: 12pm to 1am Sunday: 12pm to 11pm Monday: Closed