Wine and Mountains in Mendoza - part 1

We are up early to fly to Mendoza – just under 2 hours flying time from BA.  It’s a clear day and we fly over vast areas of cultivated land, all of it flat – which makes the sudden appearance of the snow-capped Andes all the more dramatic.

Mendoza is even hotter than BA, but it is the dry heat of a city in a desert, which has only 6cm of rain a year.  Yet it is the main wine producing region of Argentina. How is this miracle performed?  We hire a guide, and in an attempt not to drink too much of the wine opt for a bicycle tour of the vineyards.

We visit two boutique wineries in the Lujan de Cuyo area a few miles out of town.  And in the baking heat with virtually no rain, we want to know how they can grow anything here.  The answer is simple.  The melt water from the Andes is harvested as carefully as any crop and used not only to irrigate the vineyards, but to provide drinking water and 60% of the city’s electricity.

The combination of the Malbec grape, for which the region is famous, and the hot sun produces a wine that is rich, fruity and heavy.  The first sample we taste, at Filosphos bodega is almost port-like in its intensity.  We cycle on to our second bodega, Clos de Chacras, which is a new winery with an old history.  The pretty pink adobe building with thick concrete vats forming the cellars was built in 1921 but fell into disuse until the granddaughter of the original owner brought it back to life.  The bodega combines new technology for sorting and crushing the grapes with distinctly old technology of fermenting in concrete underground vats. 

The team here are eager to show off their bodega and the 3 wines they produce, not all pure malbec.  We are obviously tourists rather than buyers, but nonetheless have a lengthy conversation with them on where and how the grapes are grown, how they are watered – 37 drops per plant – shaded from the sun etc, etc.  It’s clear that the taste of the wine is largely determined on the vine.  A far cry from the days when Mendoza’s table wine was so ropey it was watered down with water before drinking.   No need to water it down now. A juicy Argentine steak would be the perfect accompaniment, but we are thankful for the cheese and biscuit to soak up the alcohol during our tasting.  The cycle back was only slightly wobblier than before!