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Septiembre 2014
On Cloud Wine.

Valle de Uco is emerging as Argentina’s premier grape-growing region with vineyards that offer winemaking workshops, horseback treks and more.

I get the big picture of the area's potential at the Vines Resort & Spa, where the ultra-smooth poured concrete floors of my private villa lead to a patio looking out over a man-made lake that perfectly reflects the peaks of the Andes across an expanse of carefully tended vines. When co-founders Pablo Gimenez Riili and Michael Evans talk about having purchased 650 acres here "a long time ago," they're referring to 2005. The story they like to tell is that Evans, an American who previously worked as a political campaign manager, came to Valle de Uco for a three-week visit and never left. Over dinner, Gimenez Riili, who hails from a Mendoza winemaking family, explains that without mountain snowmelt or river water, development here had to wait for drip-irrigation technology. The delay had its advantages: There are no telephone or power lines between you and the spectacular views of the mountains. The result is a highly controlled micro-environment within a vast natural setting. When it rained – as it will when I visit any place boasting 300 days of sunshine a year – launchers among the vines released rockets to blast away hailstones before they could damage the almost-ripe grapes. (Who said cloud seeding was just for the Beijing Olympics?)

Like the lodgings, the resort's winery is beyond bespoke. Mariana Onofri, the resort's petite and gracious wine director who oversees the blendings and barrel samplings for more than 100 private vineyard owners, takes me for a tour of the facilities. People buy in for a stake in the vineyard's general wine production, and their own allotment of wines is fine-tuned to individual specifications – the Vines team will help with planting through to shipping. The property has its own state-of-the-art lab where white-coated technicians test specimens behind glass, an area where custom-designed labels are applied, and storage for bags of personalized corks waiting to plug private bottlings. At a sturdy wooden table in a shady garden room, Onofri lines up samples that show the effects of oak (first use vs. second use vs. straight from the tank) and runs me through the kind of workshop she does with owners to gauge their preferences. She judges, accurately, that I'm not a big fan of big oak.

Suppertime proves again that South American asado is not short on drama. There are fires all around us as we take to the massive table beside the open-air kitchen at on-site restaurant Siete Fuegos, chef Francis Mallmann's ode to traditional gaucho cooking techniques. Argentina's most famous cook – he's a TV celebrity throughout the continent – lives here with his young family. I see him ambling around, grey hair wisping wildly beneath his hat, checking on cooking equipment that looks like it was forged in Hades. In fact, one of the "seven fires" is called the infiernillo (little hell), where salt-crusted salmon cooks to moistness on sheets of iron. Next to that, a cauldron is bubbling with some mysterious concoction and bread is being pulled from the flickering recesses of the wood-fired mud and brick oven. I'm expecting the beef to be good – my steak is two fingers thick with a blackened crust that splits to reveal a red slab of meat inside, with sharp chimichurri on the side – but it's the carrots, smouldered to sweetness, that are the sleeper hit. This is an earthy cuisine of bold strokes that is entirely suited to unrushed outdoor eating. In these circumstances, a pour of Recuerdo malbec could not make more sense unless a purple wine genie popped out of the bottle to talk to me in soft, velvety tones about dark berries, violets and spice. (He would be an attractive and well-dressed genie, because this is Argentina, where despite constant intake of meat, liquor and baked goodies called facturas by the dozen, everyone is attractive and well-dressed – that goes for the dashing old men with impressive heads of hair to young women plonking around wine country in platforms and halter tops.)

Fuente: AIR CANADA ENROUTE
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