Wine

Argentina Adventure

The ZAP Trip by Ship Continues

    At the end of my last column, Kathy and I were at the southern tip of South America with about 90 Zapper friends on the Oceania Insignia, doing a cruise from Chile to Argentina and coming pretty close to Antarctica. Organized by ZAP, Zinfandel Advocates and Producers, the cruise included many shipboard seminars, great wine dinners and a boatload of camaraderie. Probably unbeknownst to most folks is that southern Chile is home not only to some great salmon fisheries, but also to a huge king crab industry. We found some great restaurants, where a big plateful of shucked king crab legs would cost about $6, and we took full advantage of the opportunity, often times pairing it with a fantastic white wine from Argentina called Torrontés. It’s a crisp wine with green apple and pear qualities and a nice minerality.
    Back aboard our ship, we left Ushuaia, the provincial capital of Tierra del Fuego, to sail around Cape Horn Island, but true to many legends of the sea, the 30-foot waves and 60-mile-an-hour winds turned us back to calmer waters. The next day we made an uneventful trip to the Falkland Islands, best known as the British territory invaded by the Argentineans in 1982 during the waning days of the military dictatorship. (After a three-month battle, the British reclaimed the islands, and the following year, democracy was restored in Argentina).There’s not much to see on the Falklands except a lot of sheep, and not much to do other than sea trout fishing—and the pubs serve canned Guinness. In the big picture, it’s probably not worth fighting a war over.
    After a few more stops up the coast of Argentina, we came to rest in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, the small country situated between Brazil and Argentina. Uruguay boasts some great beaches and a wine industry built around a grape called Tannat. (Smatterings of traditional French, Italian and Portuguese varieties, which arrived with the original settlers, are still cultivated.) Tannat, true to its name, is full of tannin, the stuff in red wine that makes your mouth feel fuzzy. We found that when the grape is grown in the right places and vinified correctly, the results can be marvelous, much like a good Petite Sirah.
    We visited three wineries in the area and had a great time. Many of the families and vineyards go back more than 200 years, and they all seem to collect 1950s-era Chevys. I might add that while this varietal is very sparsely planted in California, Rosenblum Cellars actually made a Tannat in 2007 from some grapes grown by our vineyardist Gene Glassier up in Solano County. We’ll likely be releasing that wine next year, and it will be one of the few produced outside of Uruguay.
    The next port, after a short trip up the Rio de la Plata (“silver river”), was Buenos Aires, the beautiful old city of wide streets and historic stone buildings and cathedrals—and about 8 million people. But to get to Argentina’s wine country, you have to travel to such outlying regions as Salta, in the northwest, gaining notice for growing Sauvignon Blanc, Torrontés and Pinot Noir grapes at super-high elevations; Rio Negro, in northern Patagonia, producing Merlot and Pinot Noir; and especially Mendoza province, located about 400 miles west of Buenos Aires, in the eastern foothills of the Andes mountains.
    Mendoza is really an irrigated desert with water flowing down from the Andes. The city of Mendoza, with an urban population of more than 1 million, has a beautiful historic square that seems to host families, music and festivities almost all night, every night. Malbec is the main grape grown (at elevations of 4,000 to 5,000 feet) in this region, which borders central Chile. Originally from France and mainly cultivated in the Bordeaux region, Malbec is a fairly extracted and very rich red wine that can be absolutely stunning. It can be a great value; or it can be totally overpriced, as many foreign wineries are investing huge amounts of capital and expecting a commensurate payback.
    In the next installment of this South American saga, in the next issue of Alameda Magazine, I’ll focus on specific wineries and wines, and the food of this exciting region.

—By Kent Rosenblum