SJ So you are working at the winery and practicing medicine. At what point did you decide to take on writing your book, Vino Argentino: An Insider’ s Guide to the Wines and Wine Country of Argentina?
LC All my friends who had friends who were going to Argentina would ask,“ What should we do?” At first, I would write a whole email to answer, then I set up a list of places to go to, then I set up a website! But I thought, I want to tell them more. They want to hear about the history, the food. They want a little technical information about the soils and the climate, but they also want to hear the stories.
Tourism in Argentina is booming. In my travels, I realized there were some big misconceptions about Argentina. The first was that we were some sort of New World, new thing, because people were just starting to hear about it. Yet our industry dates back 400 years, starting with the Spanish. Then, since the nineteenth century and onwards, we have had 6 million Italian and other European immigrants to Argentina. My own great grandfather came from Italy in 1902. These people set up wineries in the tradition of the Old World.
Argentina is the fifth largest wine producer in the world and we are the eighth largest wine consumer in the world. So there is this rich, old tradition of wine drinking that people did not know about. At tastings I would ask people when they thought Argentina started producing wine. They would say,“ Oh, the 1980s”! They had just heard about it, and you cannot blame them, because there were not that many Argentine wines. So one goal for my book was that I wanted people to understand the rich culture that was behind the wines of Argentina.
Laura Catena ' s Vino Argentino
The second misconception was about regionality. A lot of people assume that there’ s no regional difference. But it is 2,000 miles from the north to the south where all the wine regions are, and there’ s so much diversity of soil, climate, varietals. People talk about Malbec, but we have some regions where the better wines are red blends. La Rioja Argentina, for example, which most people have never heard of, is the third largest producer in Argentina. They plant Torrontes, the truly Argentine varietal, which is so aromatic! The third thing I wanted to talk about was the highaltitude story. People want a really good bottle of wine for the best price, so I had to explain why Argentina’ s high-altitude region is different from any other region in the world.
SJ Can you explain the influence of altitude on vines and wines? Why is it important for someone asking“ Should I pay $ 25, or $ 125 for a high-altitude Catena wine?”
LC We are researching high altitude because the combination of cool climate and sunlight intensity allows the grapes to ripen slowly and accumulate tannins and flavours. If you have lots of sunlight in a very hot area, the plant shuts down and basically stops producing the good tannins. At high altitudes, the grapes are on the vine for several months. In Argentina, the length of time from veraison [ when grapes begin to change colour ] to harvest is second only to New Zealand, which has a much cooler climate than we do. So at a high altitude, the grapes have the capacity to grow slowly, in lots of sunlight. We think this combination of cool climate, high altitude, and great sunlight is very important.
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The vineyards at Bodega Catena Zapata( photo by Jill Kwiatkoski)