From Salta, we headed south on Ruta 40: the fabled lonely highway that runs north to south along the Argentinean western frontier. This was wine country in these parts, and we wanted to see what the fuss was all about. Argentina has had a bit of a renascence in the past decade with regards to wine making and the notoriety of some of their larger Bodegas(wineries). This is not a result of some recent discovery of prime grape growing conditions… The Argentineans have been growing and consuming wine in large volumes for well over a century. No, the reason for the increase in wine exports can be traced to another wine growing region in northern California: the San Francisco bay area. In the early 90’s, the Argentine government pegged the peso 1:1 to the US dollar to fight crippling hyperinflation. This stabilized the peso, but in an unsustainable way… since the government had to borrow large amounts of foreign currency to maintain this valuation. When the global economy crashed (hello, Silicon Valley… dot-com bubble), the money from foreign loans ran dry. No longer able to hold the exchange rate to dollars, the peso plummeted to 4:1 to the dollar… effectively making Argentinean exports very attractive to the world. Not only were the bottles of wine cheap to buy in foreign currency, but the underlying land and bodegas were as well. Established and aspiring winemakers from France, California, and Australia flocked to Argentina to invest in production and modernization in the regions with excellent grape growing climates. As a result, some of the best wines in the world are now made in Argentina.
We don’t profess ourselves to know much of anything regarding wines: we leave that to some of our friends (Matt, Keoni) to tell us what should be good and why. Our selection of regions and Bodegas were a bit random… mostly following listings in guidebooks and places easily reached by bus. Our first stop was a town called Cafayate… just south of Salta. Cafayate is a very dry area located at some 1700 meters of altitude. This is perfect conditions for growing white varietal grapes, specifically Torrontes grapes. This type of grape is unique to Argentina as it is a cross breed of Muscat and a local indigenous grape of the region. The resultant wine has characteristics of both base grapes… having strong and sweet aromas of Muscat(used for dessert wines), but with a dry and refined taste and finish. These bottles went down really easy with the plate loads of empanadas that we were wolfing down for lunch. :-)
Next we stopped in the town of San Juan, located just north of the more famous Mendoza region. This was a great experience as San Juan is kind of like what Mendoza must have been like a decade ago. The bodegas here are mostly small and family run… very small scale. There has not been as much winery modernization here, so the wines have a bit of a more hand crafted feel. Reds varietals are the only grapes grown here as is the case for Mendoza. Malbac is the signature grape around here, but Cabernets and Sirahs are produced as well. We did go to Mendoza as well, but did not visit some of the more well known wineries, as they were pretty far out of town. One interesting note about wine tasting here is that it is pretty rate to have any bottles opened for tasting that are aged in barrels (labeled as reserve wines)… they only open young wines. This was a bit annoying because there was no way to taste test the differences that the oak barreling made. I have to say this though… I don’t think we had a wine out here that was bad or even just ‘ok’. Most wines were good to great…. and the prices could not be beat: I think the most we ever paid was $5 USD for some really good bottles.
Here are maps of the region to get your bearings:
…and some links to photos that we took:
http://picasaweb.google.com/richmosko/Cafayate
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