Mendoza’s Wine Scene Is Crushing It

Adam Erace / Virtuoso

Francis Mallmann’s Siete Fuegos. Vineyard views at The Vines Resort & Spa.

Laura Macías Laura Macías Laura Macías

The region’s vineyards move beyond malbec.

At a winery named for a thousand soils, a bin of chardonnay grapes throws off a thousand shades of green. Radiant chartreuse and lime. Dirt-smudged olive and army camo. Some fruits emit an incandescent glow, like a cat’s eye. Others, obscured in cool shadow, suggest jade. The color depends on how the late-summer, early-harvest February light catches the curves of the clusters that Jeff Mausbach plunges his hand into. “This,” he says, hefting a heavy bunch, “is the noblest form of agriculture.”

The noblest form of agriculture bursts in my mouth like a Gushers fruit snack: sweet and juicy, with a scintilla of tannic astringency. These grapes will become one of 68 wines Mausbach and his partner, winemaker Alejandro Sejanovich, create at Mil Suelos, their winery in the Maipú GI (Geographical Indication) on the outskirts of Mendoza city. “Watch out for Argentine whites,” he says. “We talk a lot about malbec, but there’s so much more.”

When Omaha-born Mausbach and his Argentine wife, Veronica, relocated here from Buenos Aires in 2001, “cheap and cheerful malbec was everywhere,” he says. “People blended vineyards. No appellations existed.” Now it’s the opposite, with microlot bottlings redefining Mendoza’s terroir a few acres at a time. Experimentation manifests both in the vineyard, where curious growers are resurrecting abandoned fields and pushing the Andes’ altitudinal extremes, and in the winery, where “co-ferment,” “whole cluster,” and “skin contact” have become common parlance. A weekend of drinking Mendozan grenache, carignan, and riesling might leave you wondering, Malbec who?

The winery’s beet hummus.

Laura Macías

“Over the last ten years, this has become the main movement here,” Mausbach says as we walk between silvery-green olive trees to the winery’s restaurant, an airy space with foliage-fringed terraces and an impressive live-fire grill. He pours from the Buscado Vivo o Muerto (“Wanted Dead or Alive”) collection, including the sprightly La Verdad and elegant El Cerro grand cru chardonnays, while chef Álvaro Muñoz delivers scarlet tomatoes dusted with vegetable ash, fuchsia hummus made from beets cooked in embers, and a glistening rib eye the size of a tennis racket.

Mil Suelos’ restaurant runs super smoothly for a place that only opened a week prior, and it’s not alone. Everyone in Mendoza’s wine community, it seems, has something just opened or opening soon – a rebellious optimism that refuses to be soured by Argentina’s precarious economic and political climate. Mausbach has been down this road before. “We’re again in a full-blown wine-making revolution,” he says.

SB Winemaker’s House & Spa Suites.

Laura Macías

Situated on the Andes’ eastern flank, a quick one-hour flight from Santiago or two from Buenos Aires, the province of Mendoza spreads out across 57,000 square miles of ocher desert irrigated by mountain snowmelt. A vast network of canals carries water all the way down into the Uco Valley, where Argentina’s first woman winemaker, Susana Balbo, is planting vineyards that will surround a forthcoming luxury lodge. “Only white varieties and a little pinot noir,” she tells me during dinner at La Vida, the fine-dining restaurant at SB Winemaker’s House, the impeccable seven-suite hotel she and her daughter, Ana Lovaglio Balbo, own in tony Chacras de Coria, 12 miles west of Mil Suelos. “I’m powered by torrontés.”

Of all the wine produced annually in Argentina, only 17 percent is white. Balbo’s portfolio, meanwhile, is 40 percent whites: sémillon, chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, and the country’s best-known blanco, torrontés. A server pours Balbo’s Signature series torrontés. It’s lush and dignified, with just enough oak structure to manage a profusion of lychee, jasmine, and vanilla-poached pineapple.

The grape appears on chef Flavia Amad’s menu as well, as a sharp vinegar granita brightening a bowl of tender beans. The dish opens a tasting menu that unfolds with crispy bricks of rabbit, ribbons of shaved lamb tongue over carrot puree, and dueling sorbets of yerba maté and kombucha. By the time the staff wheels out the mirrored brass trolley stacked with ziggurats of Argentine quesos, I’m comatose. Fortunately, my room is just outside, past the chic little pool.

Travel-savvy Balbo designed the hotel, which opened in 2022, with a wellness focus. In each suite there’s a steam shower and a soaking tub shaped like a crosscut concrete egg – a traditional wine-aging vessel – and in the private gardens, heated tile loungers soothe plane-ruined backs. Four of the seven suites also include cedar saunas. “I travel so much, and it’s tough,” Balbo says. When you only have a few hours to rest between meetings and working meals, she explains, you want a hotel room that feels like home. While your home, like mine, may not have its own art collection or bespoke fragrance, Balbo is talking about a primal impulse to cocoon in a space “that really embraces you,” she says.

I return to my room to find the lights dimmed and the air misted with the house scent. Come to bed, whisper the notes of gardenia, sandalwood, lemon, and leather, as complex and irresistible as any Balbo bottling.

Siete Fuegos sums up Mendoza.

Laura Macías

There is no wine list at El Paisano. The sole server pours a glass of Portillo sauvignon blanc, a label of Bodegas Salentein, and leaves the bottle on the table. Later, after the plump beef and sweet potato empanadas arranged on a plate strewn with dried oregano and wands of wild lavender, she repeats the process with Portillo malbec. Although she doesn’t say it explicitly, the intimation is, Nobody’s counting – drink as much as you want.

But really, don’t drink too much. You need all your senses to absorb this three-table restaurant hidden in what looks like a frontier shantytown, run by rakish asador (grill master) Camilo Zeid, whose chambray shirt is rolled to the elbows and smells like citrus cologne, rosemary, and barbecue smoke when he pulls you, a stranger, in for a hug. He gestures guests down the dirt garden path, past the unbothered pony, to a clearing of pampas grass and wild roses, where a weathered teak table perches on the banks of a frothy gray river rushing like it’s very late to work.

El Paisano’s prix fixe parrillada is a feast for just $45 per person, including tip. Besides the empanadas, there’s purple-onion focaccia with dips, oil-beaded gazpacho, skewered grilled sweetbreads – and steak, of course, delivered in a cast-iron skillet that the server carries with two hands, blistered veggies forming a bed for the entraña (skirt cut) of Charolais beef. In the Argentine fashion, Zeid doesn’t remove the skirt’s silverskin before cooking; the grill transforms this thin membrane into basically a beef chicharrón. Each bite registers with a shattering crunch before yielding to the tender, aggressively seasoned meat.

Trailed by a scrum of six dogs, I pass two gauchos on horseback while driving to my next hotel, The Vines Resort & Spa, on the winery-dotted “Golden Mile” of Uco’s Los Chacayes subregion. Its stunning pool embraced by the silhouetted Andes, celebrity-chef restaurant (Francis Mallmann’s Siete Fuegos), and private spa with intuitive therapists tick all the luxury-resort boxes, but the venture’s real raison d’être is its 1,500 acres of cabernet franc, riesling, pinot noir, zinfandel, and more, the vineyards representing some 350 owners from all over the world.

“When we planted our first vines in 2007, we actively discouraged people from planting other varietals,” founder Michael Evans tells me the next morning. “It was all malbec, all the time, and I think we’ve collectively realized the terroir here is much more flexible.” For the last decade, The Vines has been producing 450 distinctive wines annually. “I’m not sure anybody in the world has made more different wines than Mariana.”

I meet Mariana Onofri, the gregarious wine director, for an epic tasting of a dozen wines, including a few from her own collection, Alma Gemela. (“After making wine for so many people,” she began to wonder, “Why am I not doing this for me?”) They’re a library of thrillers that bend genres like Christopher Nolan movies bend physics. Marsanne, roussanne, and chardonnay rendezvous in a co-fermented Chacayes blend that’s zippy-fresh despite ten months in oak. The nutty, oxidative nose of her amber roussanne primes the brain for butter brickle and banana bread, then drinks bone dry. Negroamaro, an inky roughneck in Italy, pirouettes in Argentina. Onofri tends an experimental half acre of the Pugliese grape, its wine expressing the vibrant acidity you’d expect from a baby gamay. “I like the style so much I’m repeating it,” she says. “Here, you can do whatever you want, in the way you want. That beautiful freedom is what makes Argentina interesting.”

Pielihueso’s natural-wine lineup.

Laura Macías

On the Golden Mile, a month-old shipping-container café with a pergola-shaded gravel patio fronts Alpasión winery. “Would you like something to drink?” the cashier asks after I order lunch. “We have our wines. Or maybe a beer … ?”

God, yes. I wash down the zingy eggplant escabeche, fried empanadas, and choripán (grilled chorizo sandwich) on house-baked sourdough – all fantastic – with a refreshing Andes Origen Fresquita. The ginger-and-kumquat-flavored ale takes a pressure washer to my palate fatigue, and soon I’m back to wine, sipping with Celina Bartolome. I find her at her winery, Pielihueso, just past the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village of Los Sauces, crushing cabernet sauvignon with her young staff to the beat of Shakira.

At a collapsible red metal patio table in the backyard, she pours amphora-aged petit verdot rosé that conjures watermelon Jolly Ranchers. Her flagship, though, is an unfiltered orange blend of torrontés, chardonnay, and sauvignon blanc. When Bartolome founded Pielihueso with her father, Alejandro, in 2017, she had a clear, patient plan for that debut vintage: “We needed to get into these five or ten restaurants in Buenos Aires to get name recognition and build the brand.” Her dad, a retired commodity-crop agronomist, had another plan: a friend who would buy it all, then resell it out of his trunk. Bartolome laughs. “That was not gonna happen.”

We drink and talk about the future of the winery (a restaurant run by the team from BA’s Anafe is forthcoming); the pervasive spirit of collaboration in Mendozan wine circles (“The Argentina culture in general puts friendship and community very high”); her wine portfolio – the rosé, the naranjo, the white blend (the same co-fermentation of orange grapes sans skin contact), the Vino de Señor red blend (“a wine my dad can take to dinner with his friends”), the malbec.

The malbec?

Bartolome retrieves a chilled bottle of Pielihueso Los Chacayes Malbec Primero from a garden shed. “Seventy percent of the vines planted in Argentina are malbec,” she says, twisting her wine key into the tangerine foil and cork. “You cannot not do anything about them – we have to make and sell malbec. But maybe what we need to start doing is being more creative about how we make it.”

How does a 32-year-old renegade natural winemaker make a malbec? In stainless steel and concrete tanks with 20 percent whole cluster grapes and strictly wild yeast. It’s buoyant, juicy, and agile, with gobs of racy red fruit and zero oak to cramp its style. Had I tasted this blind, I never would have guessed it was malbec, not in a million years.

A plum-colored teardrop trails down the front of the bottle, staining the label. Designed by Bartolome’s brother and sister, the illustration shows bubblegum-pink wine spilling from a goblet snapped at the stem like a top-heavy flower. Glasses break. In the hands of Mendoza’s plucky, freethinking winemakers, so do conventions.

Make Tracks to Mendoza

Mai10

Virtuoso on-site tour connection Mai10 works with travel advisors to craft private itineraries throughout Argentina and Uruguay. A recommendation for Mendoza: six days of winetasting and gourmet meals (including two at Francis Mallmann restaurants), artist studio visits, and nature hikes and horseback riding, with accommodations at The Vines, SB Winemaker’s House, and a family-run estancia in the Andes. Departures: Any day through December 23.

Vines Resort & Spa

In the Uco Valley’s Los Chacayes, the 21-room Vines Resort & Spa makes a convenient (and cushy) base camp for winery-hopping along the Golden Mile. A significant expansion is underway that includes a new spa, a wine education center, and 55 airy rooms, but the spectacular Andes-framed pool remains the valley’s most scenic. Virtuoso travelers receive breakfast daily, a vineyard tour and winetasting, and dinner at Francis Mallmann’s Siete Fuegos.

SB Winemaker’s House & Spa Suites

For a few years, Susana Balbo and her family lived in the gated Chacras de Coria estate that’s now SB Winemaker’s House & Spa Suites, a lushly landscaped micro-resort with seven freestanding suites oriented around a serene pool. In-room saunas, steam showers, and soaking tubs underscore the wellness focus, and full-size bottles of Balbo Signature wines wait in the minibars. Virtuoso travelers receive private round-trip airport transfers, breakfast daily, and one lunch or dinner; two-night minimum stay.

Casa de Uco Vineyards & Wine Resort

The 16 rooms, three villas, and private residence of Casa de Uco Vineyards & Wine Resort, a modernist ranch on the Golden Mile, feature earth tones, clean lines, and materials such as concrete, wood, and cowhide. Window walls afford views of the surrounding Andes, a lagoon, and vineyards of sauvignon blanc, torrontés, and petit verdot. Virtuoso travelers receive breakfast daily and one lunch or dinner.

Park Hyatt Mendoza

Surrounded by wine bars and restaurants in the city, the 186-room Park Hyatt Mendoza lends a touch of urban energy to a Mendoza itinerary. The grand hotel occupies a stately, white nineteenth-century building, which also houses a casino, a spa, and the sun-dappled Las Terrazas restaurant overlooking Plaza Independencia. Virtuoso travelers receive breakfast daily and a $100 dining credit.

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