Argentina is joining the ranks of best-known wine producing countries, with wine exports up by 30% in the last year and new wines appearing in stores all the time. Malbec is the most famous grape-since a blight wiped out most all Malbec crops in Europe a century ago, and Malbec has been 're-discovered' in Argentina. The full bodied, intense flavored grape was brought and cultivated by Franciscan monks and has survived all this time.
Mendoza is Argentina's wine country--thousands of hectarias of grapes are cultivated there. The land is irrigated with water from area rivers using an irrigation system inspired by the system indigenous tribes used in irrigating their crops. Mendoza is a hot and arid zone that's difficult to cultivate (impossible without the irrigation system-a source of local pride).
Harvest time (La Vendimia) is marked in Mendoza with parades and celebrations that last for weeks. This happens in March and April (Argentina's fall season)-they even crown a harvest queen (La Reina de la Vendimia)! You can see this year's queen here. Harvest season in Bowen is a very busy time-laborers work picking grapes morning till night. The tannic scent of grapes wafts on the air, and bodegas (wineries) are in full production.
The majority of wineries don't grow their own grapes-they buy them from area farmers and bring them in to the factory in huge truckloads. The trucks are like giant Tonka trucks, uncovered mounds of grapes heaped in the back, bees swarming around the 'cargo', attracted by the sweet scent of the grape juice warming under the hot sun.
I counted 30 trucks pulled up in front of the bodega in front of my in-laws house on a Friday night the year before last. The trucks come in, and the drivers with them-they need to stay and guard the cargo until it has gone through processing at the bodega! So the 30 trucks and their drivers stay out and awake all night, barbecuing in the street (they set up little parillas on the dirt road), listening to music, drinking, cavorting and having a grand old time. Not a very restful night for us because of the noise, but completely fascinating as a foreigner!
The photo below is a group of school kids on their way home from class for their lunch break, stealing grapes off the trucks as a snack. I thought it was so charming-an innocence that we hardly see in the US anymore. (The white and blue coats are their school uniforms).
We went to tour a family winery called Goyenechea. This is the road leading to the winery.
The winery was established by two brothers, Santiago and Narciso, two brothers who emigrated to Argentina from Spain's Basque region. This is the bodega they constructed in the late 1890s. Their land holdings (1,200 hectares) was once the largest continuous vineyard in the world and included the bodega, the vineyards, a school, a chapel, the family home, 50 houses and a social club (for the bodega's employees).
What I love about this place is that it is not one of those shiny, new bodegas that give you a canned winery tour with a few French oak barrels thrown in to give you the 'winery experience'. This bodega is still family owned, many things are done by hand, and it is very rustic. I love that the paint is chipping, and things seem like they're about a year away from falling apart.
'Taller'-the old workshop-it's full of old and out-of-date farm and bodega equipment that's no longer in use-even an old boat! I think it would make a nice restaurant space.
Large oak doors at the entrance to the bodega-wood is a common material in Mendoza, and used to create works of art like this.
Grapes are being unloaded from the truck (the green thing heaped with grapes), carried in the yellow crates, and dumped into a huge vat...
The vat has a metal spiral in it that crushes the grapes, stirred by the man with the big wooden stick. There's a machine that separates the grapes, juice and stems.
These are old barrels that were used to process the wine, now stainless steel barrels are used.
Smaller French and American oak barrels used in the aging process.
So many remarkable things on our little tour! One area of the bodega was a series of rooms that's now connected by a hallway and used to store hundreds of bottles of wine as they age, before they go through the labeling process and are shipped and sold. The rooms were about 6 feet by 10 feet with 10 foot ceilings, cool and made of brick. They were formerly the tanks used to process the grape juice-it was all stored in these brick rooms! I find the thought of an entire room filled with wine amazing, it makes me wonder where it went in those days, who drank it. There were little bits of crystallized sugars still sparkling on walls.
This guy is making Grappa. He's shoveling the stems and skins of the grapes and making an even layer of them to be pressed. Then the juice is distilled, making a clear, concentrated alcohol. It will knock you silly, and should therefore be consumed with caution.
Here's another part of the Grappa making process. The stems are pressed by screwing a wooden disk down until all the juice has been extracted. Those big purple black discs on the left are the pressed stem patties.
And if you think this looks like the hardest job at the bodega, you should know that there are literally guys wearing no shirts, plastic waders and carrying shovels working down in a hole inside the plant, where it's like 100 degrees. (They should form a union.) Down the hole, a big plastic tube pours in grapes and juice, which they shovel into the juicer, making sure nothing gets stuck. By this time, fermentation has already started, and the smell coming from the hole is positively alcoholic. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing to be down there, illuminated by a single dangling bulb with the roar of machinery behind you, but it's not a job I envy!
Malbec is a full-bodied red, though at Goyenechea we sampled a Rose (sharing a single tasting glass used by the bodega manager to test the juice-no tasting room here!) directly out of the stainless steel cask. There are also some lovely Torrontes, Chardonnay and even sparkling whites (Champagne-called Champu by locals) produced in Argentina.
There are many very affordable Malbecs available in the US, though from what I've found, Goyenechea is not yet one of them. I think it's available in the UK (lucky!) We buy our Malbec from a web site called Drink Up NY-a New York based online wine and spirits store. They also do a wine events and tastings newsletter that you can subscribe to. Their prices are very reasonable and they have a nice selection of Argentinian (and other South American) wines. One note: don't be turned off by Malbec's (generally) low price point-the cost of production is so much lower in Argentina than other countries that the wine is much cheaper compared to European or American bottles of a similarly high quality. If you need a recommendation, I'd go for the Luigi Bosca Reserva Malbec 2005 or anything by Susana Balbo (a woman vintner who has won several awards).
Have fun-pair with beef (of course) anything barbecued or grilled, Roquefort cheese or strong Parmesan-laced pasta dishes. Please write in and let me know if you've had Malbec or are trying Malbec for the first time! I'd also love to hear about your own wine tour experiences!
