The spiraling price of land is directly related to the quality of the area’s wines. Just recently, O Fournier, a Spanish-owned winery in El Cepillo at the southern end of the valley, started selling vineyard plots to investors at US$150,000 per hectare. Eighty per cent of the vines in La Consulta disappeared within a decade.įast forward 20 years and “Uco Valley wine country” is being talked about as the new Napa Valley (in terms of tourist appeal rather than wines), complete with lifestyle second homes and its own golf course. By the mid-1990s, when the modern boom began, the area under vine had dropped from 18,000ha at its high point to 6,000ha, as growers pulled out Malbec and planted tomatoes instead. When the Argentine government offered an incentive in the early 1970s to plant in hotter East Mendoza, prompting a boom in high-yielding, poor quality Criolla, the more isolated Uco Valley, where flood irrigation was impossible because of topography, went into decline. Traditionally, Uco Valley grapes were used to add colour and acidity to those from warmer areas, but rarely featured on labels, or in consumers’ minds, in their own right. There had been vineyards here at least since the 1920s, planted by intrepid Italian and Spanish immigrants whose old vines are much prized today, but the Uco Valley was considered too far from the consumers and production facilities of Mendoza to be truly viable. The focus was still very much on traditional areas close to the city, such as Luján de Cuyo and the sun-baked flatlands of East Mendoza, but the Uco Valley was seen, even then, as a place of great potential. The first time I went to Mendoza, in 1993, local winemakers were just beginning to talk about a new, or rather rediscovered, region an hour’s drive to the south west, in the foothills of the Andes. And without the wine industry, Mendoza would be a dusty backwater. Without snowmelt for irrigation water, there would be no wine industry, or agriculture, in these near desert conditions. Dominated to spectacular effect by the Andes, this bustling provincial city owes its very existence to the mountains. Buenos Aires may be the capital of Argentina, but the hub of its wine business lies nearly 750 miles to the west in Mendoza.
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