By Trevor Felch for TheStudentLife.com
It's been a sensational year of global wine tasting for yours truly. Studying in France last spring provided me with the chance for a weekend of sancerres and vouvrays in the Loire Valley and a freezing day in Reims amongst the bubbly champagnes of Mumm and Moet et Chandon. My spring break trip to Central Europe allowed me to visit the Hungarian Wine Museum in Budapest, a magnificent stop for sampling the wines of one of the world's emerging viticulture areas. A quick stop in June in Porto, Portugal enabled for visits to some of the great port wine houses. Despite having grown up in the Bay Area, I finally visited the Napa wine region for the first time during the summer.
And this past March as part of my 11 day trip to Chile and Argentina, I had the opportunity to experience one of the world's most impressive and very young still wine regions, the Mendoza of Argentina. An hour flight west of Buenos Aires at the eastern foot of the Andes, Mendoza is a rugged, dry region, perfect for the full bodied red grapes it produces, making some of the world's most coveted red wines of all price ranges. It almost seems like fate that Argentina happens to produce some of the world's finest cattle for beef and red wine grapes. A bottle of malbec and a slab of ojo de bife with chimichurri...it doesn't get much better.
Argentina's more temperate northern region of Salta produces the country's majority of whites, including the torrontes varietal which is starting to gain more respect as a dryer white wine rival to sauvignon blanc. Yet the heart and soul of Argentina's wine culture is the over 370,000 acres of Uco Valley, Lujan and Maipu regions in the Mendoza province, creating more than 70% of Argentina's wines. Within those areas of the province are several other appellations that put Mendoza on par with many of the world's top wine producers for quality and quantity of its product. Argentina is now the world's 6th largest producer of wine.
Mendoza has had vineyards since the Spanish arrived back in the 1500's to Argentina, but its wines were not even thought of on a global scale until Nicolás Catena set out to bring the winemaking techniques of well known vineyards in France and Napa (including Napa's famed winemaker Paul Hobbs who now has a vineyard in Mendoza, Viña Cobos) to Mendoza and blended them with the perfect terroir for vineyard growing, creating a world class winemaking region. Much of Argentina is too hot year round for wine growing, so the vineyards had to be built in cooler areas such as the Mendoza at a high elevation near the Andes. It took until 2002 for the Argentine peso to devalue enough for international exports of wines to be profitable and since then exports have shot through the roof the past decade, while Argentina still also enjoys a great number of its wines still at home. Foreign giants such as Moet et Chandon have stamped their place in Argentina much like they did in Napa when it emerged in the 1960's, yet Argentina's wine industry still is very much a homegrown, local enterprise, as much a piece of life local life in the country as soccer and parillas.
Malbec grapes are the specialty of Mendoza without a doubt, a spectacular product of the dry, high elevation that perfectly compliments beef at a parilla. What I find most wonderful about malbec is that it has the complexity...Read Full Article
