Even though they’ve been making wine in Argentina for a very long time, the history of the vine in that country has been a troubled one.  When I teach my class on Argentina and Chile, I tell attendees that the topic is more about politics and economics than winemaking.

We’ve all seen Evita, and even though the show takes some liberties with historical reality, there’s no questioning that Argentina has had its share of political upheaval during most of the 20^th century.  Governmental instability means no foreign investment, which means no French or American winemakers coming to the country to develop and promote its obvious viticultural advantages.  But next door in comparatively-less-turbulent Chile?  Big difference.  They were miles ahead.  Not any more.

Here’s a surprise.  Argentina is the 5^th largest grower of wine grapes in the world.  There are more vines down there than in all of Australia and New Zealand combined.  And they’ve been planting them since the mid 1800s, when French growers brought in cuttings from Bordeaux and mostly from Cahors.  As it happens Cahors is the home of the Malbec grape, and what Cabernet is to Napa, Malbec is to most of Argentina.

Before its rise to international regard over the past 20 years, most of the wine produced in Argentina was for local consumption.  Since there’s an abundance of irrigation water flowing down from the Andes, the growers went for quantity over quality, pulling 9-10 tons an acre off the vines, making watery, weak bulk wine, and selling it in cardboard cartons.

That was then.  This is now, and we can thank people like the Catena family for that.

Nicolas and Laura Catena

Nicola Catena came ashore in Argentina from Italy in 1898 and planted his first vineyard in the Mendoza region in 1902.  Time went on.  Nicola’s son Domingo took over, and became one of the largest vineyard holders in the area.

Then came the problems.  Inflation.  Revolution.  Economic collapse.  Meanwhile, Domingo’s son Nicolás had earned his PhD in economics and taken over the vineyards in the mid 1960s.  Nobody who has a doctorate in economics wants to live in a society that suffers from 1000% inflation, or under a government that does wacky things like declare war on England.  He left the family business and went to teach in a calmer, more level-headed place.  The University of California at Berkeley.  In the late 1960s.

Catena vineyards. Nice background

Good move, because California wine country was just up the road, and Nicolás and his wife Elena took advantage of the opportunity (to say the least) and pretty much sampled their way through the whole area.  This, incidentally, was just at the time when California wine was beginning to make a serious (and well-deserved) impact on the international wine world.  Inspired, the Catenas returned home.

Fast forward.  Today, Nicolás’ vineyards in Mendoza, some of them at elevations of almost 5,000 feet, are producing wines that routinely receive classic scores from critics like Robert Parker.  I’ve mentioned before in these writings that people come to winemaking from all sorts of weird directions, and Nicolás’ daughter Laura is a poster child for that observation.  She studied to be an emergency room physician, and earned degrees from Harvard and Stanford, but today she does what we all want to do.  She makes killer Malbec, and other wines as well.

There’s a lot to it.  Precise vineyard management, hand pruning, resisting the urge to use all the runoff from the Andes for irrigation, leaf thinning, hand harvesting, and all the rest.  Hey, if it were easy, we’d all be doing it.

Watering the grapes...but not much

The work of Nicolás and Laura earned him recognition as Man of the Year in 2009 from Decanter magazine, and their 2007 Malbec was recognized as one of the Top 100 Wines of the Year by Wine Spectator.  Speaking of which, the magazine’s critic James Molesworth, in a December 15, 2009 article on Argentine Malbecs, rated six of Catena Zapata’s wines in the top eleven….all 93-plus points out of 100.

In the tasting room -- the fun part

Obviously, they’re doing something right.

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