Twenty Years that Transformed the Argentine Wine Industry

BY JOAQUÍN HIDALGO | OCTOBER 08, 2020

Que veinte años no es nada

Que febril la mirada, errante en las sombras

(“Twenty years ain’t nothin’

My feverish gaze peers through the gloom”)

From “Volver,” a tango by Carlos Gardel and Alfredo Le Pera

For many wine lovers, Mendoza Malbec is synonymous with easygoing reliability, a choice you can turn to with confidence that a bottle isn’t going to offer up any unexpected surprises. Its enormous constituency of US consumers, which ranges from New Haven to Houston, Phoenix to Milwaukee, drank 82 million bottles of Argentine wine in 2019 and sees Malbec as something you can slip into like a comfortable pair of old slippers. For these fans, I have both good and bad news.

The good news is that Argentina, and Mendoza especially, continues to produce just that kind of red. More unsettling, perhaps, is the fact that as the Mendoza Malbec category has established itself over the past decade, many wines from this southerly corner of the globe have undergone a sharp change in stylistic and creative direction, of a kind one only sees in countries as turbulent as Argentina.   

But don’t shoot the messenger. Those looking for new experiences for the palate will find that down at the other end of the Americas, a number of alluring trends have sprung up alongside the tried and tested traditions.

Looking back over the experience of tasting more than a thousand wines for this report, not counting the many more I tried previously, I can safely say that in the past 20 years, Argentina has produced enough revelations in the cellar to dispel any notion of comfortable old predictability. 

The wine producing area of Argentina spans 1,500 miles, from Quebrada de Humahuaca to the north to the Patagonian vineyards of Chubut in the south but the Cuyo region accounts for 95% of total surface area under vine.

Twenty Bumpy Years

In Argentina we have a saying that describes the shifting moods of the country: You can go away for a week only to discover that everything’s changed when you get back, but return after 20 years and you’ll find that nothing has changed at all. History has proved this to be surprisingly apt.

So far in the 21st century, we have endured two separate crises over the national debt (negotiations to resolve the most recent one recently concluded), ten presidents, and abrupt changes in export and trade policies alternating between free market and protectionist approaches. The current situation is uncertain, to say the least. Faced with an unprecedented global crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the country has been on lockdown for seven months; extremely strict controls have been set regarding the purchase of foreign currency; and inflation last year ran at 50% and this year seems likely to be at least 35%. If you squint a little, 2020 begins to look a lot like 2001.   

And yet the wine industry appears to have bucked the trend. Facing both short- and long-term challenges, it has undergone progressive change that leaves it unrecognizable from what it was 20 years ago. Three facts sum up the process neatly: exports have risen from $90 million to $800 million; the domestic market has shrunk from 36 liters per capita to 18 (although it’s been rebounding during the lockdown); and the focus on vineyards has moved to higher altitudes, in search of climates that make possible for a greater variety of styles. These profound changes are coming out in the glass.  

Just take a look at the highest-scoring labels among the thousand or so I tasted for this report, with the exception of one from Río Negro in Patagonia and two from Luján de Cuyo, they all come from high-altitude vineyards in the Uco Valley, where evocative Geographic Indications such as Gualtallary, San Pablo, Los Chacayes, Paraje Altamira and Pampa El Cepillo are to be found. Some were only just beginning to be planted 20 years ago, while others didn’t even exist as regions. What happened, then, to make them such a success? 

The upper Uco Valley, first planted in the 1990s, boasts the highest and coolest vineyards in Mendoza, spread across GIs such as San Pablo, Los Chacayes and Gualtallary (which is pending approval). The majority of older vineyards are in Primera Zona, near the city of Mendoza.

Changing Natures

Between 2002 and 2018 (the period for which we have the most reliable and complete statistics), the surface area of Argentina under vine grew by 5.6% to 218,000 hectares. But this overall growth conceals major variations: some regions expanded much more than the average, and others actually shrank. To offer a pair of extreme examples: the surface area of vineyards in the Uco Valley planted above a height of 1,000 meters (this being the dividing line between warm and moderate to cool zones) almost doubled from 14,200 hectares to 28,244, while areas below 800 meters – the southern oasis, the east of Mendoza – lost 22,000 hectares, a 30% drop, over the same time period. 

In other words, a significant portion of the vineyards migrated from the warm plains to the much cooler foothills of the Andes. Where before the postcards showed the mountains very much in the background, perhaps behind an avenue of poplars, today the peaks and glaciers loom large over the vines, and producers have begun to refer to the category of “mountain wines.” This migration is very much reflected in the descriptions and scores in this report.  

Luján de Cuyo is set right at the 1,000-meter mark, in the suburbs of Mendoza. Forever threatened by the growth of the city, which continues to drive up land prices, it has thus far managed to survive and thrive. Today, one of the brightest spots in the region is Agrelo, while older corners with their equally old vines, such as Las Compuertas, Vistalba, Lunlunta and Drummond, are able to hold back the encroachment of gated communities thanks to the increasing value of their wines.           

Mendoza accounts for seven out of every ten bottles produced in Argentina. The province of large mountains and expansive deserts is thus fairly indicative of the entire country, although there are, of course, subtle differences.