Patagonian reds

Compared to Mendoza, this southern Argentinian region is a minnow, and one still finding its best terroirs. But it’s an exciting work in progress, discovers Patricio Tapia

THe PReDOMINANCe OF Mendoza in the context of Argentinian wine is a matter of size: more than 75% of the country’s 217,000 hectares of vineyards are planted there. But it is also about leadership in terms of terroir. Some of the wines with the strongest sense of place today in Argentina come from this province.

But that supremacy doesn’t mean we should dismiss other evolving regions. Patagonia, 1,000km south of Mendoza, is one of them – despite its relative small size (it represents only 1.68% of Argentina’s vineyard land).

The two most important wine provinces in Patagonia are Río Negro and Neuquén. The first has a great wine tradition, dating back more than a century, while the second, with most of its vineyards planted in the late 1990s, is one of the youngest in Argentina. La Pampa is another – also very nascent in wine terms, with just a couple of hundred hectares of vines.

Around the Colorado and Río Negro rivers, and at heights that do not exceed 500m (in Mendoza, they can reach 1,600m), vineyards in Patagonia flourish under the