Mendoza

Mendoza's water is administered by an institution older than most of its wineries. The Departamento General de Irrigación dates its own origin to 1884, when article 189 of the province's general water law created it as the Departamento General de Aguas. It was renamed the Departamento de Irrigación in 1894 and reached its present name in a further modification of 1916. The body is decentralised, with institutional and budgetary autonomy and constitutional rank.

Mendoza's wine had a quality problem and a distance problem, and the second one was solved first. In 1885 railways were built to the province, allowing easy transport of the region's wines to the country's trade hub of Buenos Aires. Before that, a desert province a thousand kilometres from its market could only sell what it could cart. The rails turned local surplus into a national commodity.

The people followed the freight. Following the development of the wine industry in the province around 1900, Mendoza began to grow quickly, attracting tens of thousands of European immigrants — particularly Spaniards, according to the provincial record. The Italian strand is documented at the level of individual houses rather than provincial statistics: Bodega Catena Zapata tells its own founding as a passage from Italy to Mendoza, and from Bonarda to Malbec.

The Malbec revival is usually told without its first act, which is a collapse. Mendoza's critical wine industry was left reeling by the 1983 failure of the state-owned vintner Bodegas Giol. Its dictatorship-era receivers had run what was then the largest wine conglomerate outside Europe and accumulated over six billion US dollars of debt. The company did not disappear immediately; Giol closed in 1991.

The vineyards came out of the ground on a scale that has no parallel in a famous wine region. Mendoza's total planted area declined from 629,850 to 360,972 acres — 254,891 to 146,080 hectares — between 1980 and 2003. That is a loss of roughly 43% of the province's vines inside a generation. Mendoza remained the leading producer of wine in Argentina throughout, which says as much about the scale it started from as about the loss.

Two dates circulate for the same famous vineyard, and both are correct because they describe different events. The Catena Institute of Wine records that the Adrianna Vineyard, planted in 1992, was initially Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Merlot. The Malbec claim is separate and later: Nicolás Catena Zapata is considered the pioneer of high-altitude growing and was the first, in 1994, to plant a Malbec vineyard at 5,000 feet above sea level in the Mendoza region.

The date Malbec reached Argentina is genuinely disputed, and the sources split cleanly. The Catena Institute of Wine records that the vine nursery known as the Quinta Nacional was founded in 1853, after Domingo Faustino Sarmiento hired the Frenchman Michel Aimé Pouget to establish it in Mendoza. A competing account states that Malbec was introduced to Argentina by the French agricultural engineer Michel Pouget in 1868. The same man, fifteen years apart.

What the vine escaped is not disputed. Malbec became less popular in Bordeaux after 1956, when frost killed off 75% of the crop, and by 1968 plantings in the Libournais were down to 4,900 hectares. The variety's vulnerabilities — coulure, downy mildew, frost — had already been costing it ground to Merlot and Cabernet Franc through the twentieth century. Argentina held the material that France was replanting away from.

Argentina codified origin late and in stages. The appellation-of-origin law passed in 1999 set the framework for the creation of Argentinian indications of origin, the country's quality distinction system. The administrative machinery came a decade later: by resolution C.39 of 30 December 2009, the Instituto Nacional de Vitivinicultura created its Departamento de Protección del Origen under Law 25,163. The trade itself operates under the older General Wine Law No. 14,878.

Mendoza was founded facing the wrong way. On 2 March 1561 Pedro del Castillo founded the city and named it Ciudad de Mendoza del Nuevo Valle de la Rioja, after the governor of Chile — and until the creation of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776, the area belonged to the Captaincy General of Chile. Fewer than 80 Spanish settlers are estimated to have lived here before 1600. Long before them, the Atuel river valleys saw the rise of the Agrelo culture, ancestor of the Huarpes, later influenced greatly by the Inca empire during the fifteenth century. Agricultural production rose when nearby rivers were tapped for irrigation in 1788.

Mendoza's harvest festival is older than its official version. The first Vendimia celebrations in Mendoza province occurred in the seventeenth century, while the first official festival took place in 1936 — what 1936 added was the institution rather than the celebration. The scale is theatrical in the literal sense: the Acto Central takes place in the Frank Romero Day Greek theatre and is a spectacle of light and sound featuring over a thousand performers and dancers, closing with a large fireworks display and the crowning of a national Vendimia queen. Mendoza's Vendimia has been ranked number two in National Geographic's list of the world's top ten harvest festivals.

What the authority does is narrower and more powerful than the word irrigation suggests. It administers the water resource of Mendoza province, regulating and policing its use, and its remit covers preservation, distribution and regulation of water in both natural and artificial channels. In a province where annual precipitation runs between 150 and 350 millimetres, that is not a utility function. It is the allocation of the single input without which no vineyard in Mendoza produces anything at all.

The system is not run top-down. Water users participate through inspecciones de cauce — channel inspectorates — which administer the secondary irrigation network and hold powers of monitoring and sanction. They have their own autonomy, subject to the legal and budgetary control the Departamento General de Irrigación exercises over them. A grower in Mendoza therefore sits inside a self-governing water community with enforcement teeth, not merely at the end of a pipe.

The Catena Institute of Wine states the threshold plainly: in Mendoza, vineyards located above 1,000 metres above sea level — such as the regions of Altamira, Eugenio Bustos, El Cepillo and Gualtallary — are considered high-altitude vineyards. The figure is not universal. The institute notes that the qualifying elevation varies with latitude and proximity to the ocean, which is why a Mendoza number cannot be lifted and applied to another country's hillsides.

The first mechanism is respiratory. Cool temperatures in high-altitude regions allow for lower respiration rates, which enhances the concentration of malic acid in the berries — night respiration burns acid, and cold nights burn less of it. Wines from high-altitude regions therefore offer higher acid levels. The consequence is structural rather than cosmetic: wines with higher acidity can be aged longer, since acidity helps reduce the effects of oxidation.

The second mechanism is defensive. As altitude increases the atmosphere thins, sunlight intensity rises, and the ultraviolet-B fraction rises with it. UV-B damages living tissue, so the vine protects its seeds by manufacturing compounds that happen to be exactly what a winemaker wants. The UV-B results in a greater accumulation of polyphenols and aromatic compounds in the berry, and a higher content of polyphenols and aromatics translates into darker colour, more complex flavours and longer ageing potential.

The effect has been quantified against one vineyard's own elevation. Bodega Catena Zapata places the family's Adrianna Vineyard at almost 5,000 feet elevation, and at that height the Catena Institute records UV-B levels approximately 38% higher than in regions located at 500 metres above sea level. The same cold that raises acidity lets early-ripening varieties such as Chardonnay reach low alcohol levels with higher acidity, while the sunlight intensity still allows late-ripening varieties to achieve optimal ripeness despite the cold. Altitude buys both ends of the ripening curve.

What was pulled matters as much as how much. The province had been built on high-yielding pink-skinned varieties grown for domestic bulk wine, and those have not vanished: Cereza and Criolla Grande still account for nearly a quarter of all vineyard plantings in Mendoza. The reconstruction was a substitution rather than an expansion — premium red varieties replanted on land that had grown volume, with more than half of plantings now given to premium reds.

The elevation also comes in two published figures, both from the owner. Bodega Catena Zapata states that the family's Adrianna Vineyard at almost 5,000 feet elevation has been called the grand cru of South America. The Catena Institute of Wine is more precise, giving the vineyard's high altitude as 4,757 feet. Both are the producer's own measure; neither should be quoted as a bare metric number, and they should not be averaged into a third figure that nobody published.

The site sits in the Tupungato department of the Uco Valley, in what the Catena Institute still describes as the soon-to-be appellation of Gualtallary. The vineyard now covers 120 hectares. Its Malbec traces to selected plants in lot 18 of the Angelica vineyard — historic rows planted circa 1930 on the banks of the Mendoza river — and 125 Malbec selections were planted at Adrianna specifically to study how the variety behaves across different terroirs.

The most striking number in Mendoza viticulture is a measure of inconsistency. At the Adrianna Vineyard — which its owner Bodega Catena Zapata places at almost 5,000 feet elevation — soils are so heterogeneous, the Catena Institute records, that topsoil depth differs from 30 to 200 centimetres within 10 metres distance inside the same lot. The cause is alluvial: the soils were born of the flow of water from ancient rivers and glaciers, combined with Andean volcanic activity. The consequence is that a single lot is not a single growing condition.

Shallow topsoil means less water retention, which produces differences in vigour and berry characteristics across distances a person can walk in seconds. That is why the mapping work matters. The extensive work of identifying the more than 200 parcels inside Adrianna was started by Dr Laura Catena and later continued by Alejandro Vigil and the Catena Institute team, and the research has run across the last two decades and continues today.

The soil research overturned the region's own assumption about itself. In the institute's words, people always said that because of Mendoza's characteristics the soils were just sterile matter — and the finding was the opposite. Plant-growth-promoting rhizobacteria that live naturally in those soils help vines resist frost and disease and grow properly in extreme climate conditions. A desert soil was reclassified as a biological system.

The claim that Argentine Malbec is genetically distinct was tested rather than asserted. In 1995 a French Malbec clone was planted in the La Pirámide vineyard next to Catena's own selections; by 2003 the two behaved differently. Five Argentine clones were then sent to the UC Davis nursery in 2007 and planted alongside French selections, and in 2011 significant differences were observed between the yields and phenolic compounds of the French and Argentine clones.

The province's own geographic record does not soften the risk: annual precipitation lies between 150 and 350 millimetres, and hail is a significant, and not uncommon, problem in the regional viticulture. The rainfall that does arrive is the problem rather than the solution. Precipitation falls mainly as very scarce but often severe thunderstorms that bring hail and high winds — a single storm can remove a season's crop from a block.

The second hazard has a name and a season. The Zonda is the regional term for the foehn wind that occurs on the eastern slope of the Andes: dry, often carrying dust, warmed by descent from a crest approximately 6,000 metres above sea level, and capable of exceeding 240 km/h. When Zonda winds blow downslope, Mendoza temperatures can soar to 30 degrees Celsius in the middle of otherwise cool conditions.

The timing is what makes the Zonda a viticultural problem rather than a weather inconvenience. It blows from the Andes during the flowering period of early summer, and this fierce wind of hot, dry air can disrupt the flowering process and severely reduce potential yields. Flowering damage is unrecoverable within the season: a vine that fails to set fruit in December cannot make it up in February.

Boundary-drawing in Mendoza is done by the people who farm the ground. The Catena Institute of Wine, the Catena viticultural team and the INV technical committee worked together to create the Paraje Altamira IG, and the institute records that it is currently working on delimiting the boundaries of the Gualtallary IG. The most-studied vineyard in the region therefore sits in a district whose legal outline is still being drawn.

One Mendoza appellation predates the national framework, and its date is reported differently by different sources. The English-language record dates Luján de Cuyo to 1993 as Mendoza's first controlled appellation. House research files put the DOC itself at 1989, with international recognition following later, which would make 1993 the year of recognition rather than of founding. The sequence is agreed; the year is not, and both figures are stated here rather than merged.

The festival sits on a working calendar. Harvest in Mendoza runs across February to April, which is why the celebration lands in early March rather than at the European harvest moment six months away. The Uco Valley has a long growing season with over 250 sunny days a year, little rain and vast temperature differences between day and night — conditions that stretch ripening late and make the picking window a matter of weeks, not days.

The canals are still visible at street level. Open trenches called acequias run along every street in Mendoza city, watering roughly 100,000 trees, and the design was not Spanish in origin. The Huarpes devised the irrigation system that the Spanish later developed, and that inheritance allowed a population increase that might not otherwise have occurred. The trees a visitor walks under in central Mendoza are drinking from the same logic as the vines.

One rail line went the other way, and it is gone. Mendoza's development was helped partly by its position at the start of the Transandine railway linking it to Santa Rosa de los Andes in Chile, the only railway operable between Argentina and Chile. It was a metre-gauge line with Abt rack sections meeting broad-gauge networks at both ends, so a run from Buenos Aires to Chile meant two changes of train. After many years of inactivity, it remains abandoned.

The rebuild drew outside money and outside winemakers. High-altitude Mendoza has attracted notable foreign winemakers such as Paul Hobbs, and by the turn of the century the province's vineyard area alone was slightly less than half the entire planted area of the United States and more than New Zealand and Australia combined. A region that had just lost 43% of its vines was still, by area, one of the largest in the world.

The stated reason for going up was not novelty but imitation. Nicolás Catena decided to plant here to obtain wines from a cooler climate, on the model of the great wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux — the goal was European coolness reached by climbing rather than by moving north. Two critics quoted by the house frame the outcome: Jancis Robinson credits him with putting Argentinean wines on the world map by focusing entirely on quality, and Baron Eric de Rothschild calls him instrumental in changing the Argentinian wine scene.

The research programme has an institutional origin with a date. Dr Laura Catena joined the family winery in 1995 and founded its first research and development department, which today is the Catena Institute of Wine. Its published output is not marketing collateral: it includes a joint study with UC Davis described as the most extensive Malbec study carried out to date, published in Food Chemistry and the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture.

Site, not just genetics, was tested too. In partnership with UC Davis the Catena Institute compared 42 vineyard sites from Mendoza and California, vinifying them in a standardised way so site differences could emerge, then analysed phenolic and aromatic compounds and ran comparative tastings. Certain lots produced distinctly different profiles — lot 6 from Adrianna among them. Argentine Malbec is separately described as producing softer, less tannic-driven wines than Cahors.

Water scarcity is a live argument, not a historical one. The superintendent of the Departamento General de Irrigación is quoted on the authority's own front page saying that a historic snowfall does not end years of water crisis — that whoever believes it is over, that nature has settled the matter, is mistaken. In a province whose entire viticulture is irrigated from Andean melt, the snowpack is the harvest forecast.

The city that stands today is a reconstruction. The 1861 Mendoza earthquake is believed to have killed somewhere in the range of 6,000 to 12,000 people, and most of the buildings were destroyed, including the colonial cabildo. The province of Cuyo had already divided in 1820, Mendoza parting from San Luis and San Juan. Twenty-four years after the earthquake the railways arrived, and the rebuilt city became a wine capital rather than a frontier post.