The passion of Argentina

Sep 25 2009 by Helen Savage, The Journal

ARGENTINA is on a roll. Even in these straitened times, sales of Argentine wines continue to grow in the UK.

Argentina offers excellent value and tastes that are distinct, especially from its dominant red wine grape Malbec and from its very own, floral white, Torrontés.

It also claims both the highest and also the most southerly vineyards in the world: twin sources of some exceptional and highly unusual wines, as I discovered recently at the annual Wines of Argentina trade show in London.

The star winery of the high Andes in Salta region is probably the Swiss-owned Bodega Colomé. It’s a vast estate of 39,000 hectares, only a small proportion of which is covered by vines. A few of these, unusually for a region associated with some of Argentina’s most recent and innovative wine projects, are among the oldest in the country.

I met chief winemaker Thibault Delmotte, who after a career in Burgundy and Bordeaux, went to northern Argentina on holiday and loved it so much that he applied to do a work placement at Colomé and then stayed. “It is a very nice place – and the quality of life is great.”

He also makes very nice wines: unusually rich, soft Torrontés and very elegant, Malbec-dominated red blends, including my wine of the week. The floral-scented Torrontés has none of the slight bitterness that can slightly spoil other wines made from this grape. Thibault says this is because cold fermentation encourages the yeasts to produce high levels of glycerine in the wine.

Other distinctive flavours are more the product of the special environ- ment in which the grapes are grown than any winemaking wizardry.

At altitudes as high as 3,000 metres, dry, brilliantly sunny days with high levels of UV thicken the skins of the grapes, which ripen slowly to become deeply coloured and tannic. Combined with cool nights, the grapes develop intense flavours with crisp acidity (there’s no need to add tartaric acid here as in other parts of the country) and rather less welcome, levels of sugar so high that his best wine cannot be sold in the UK: at over 16pc alcohol: it falls into the duty band reserved for fortified wine of which the European Union allows in only a tiny quota.

Another unusual feature of Colomé is that the whole estate is a gradual conversion to biodynamic viticulture: a homeopathic approach, with work organised in accord with the movements of the planets and distant stars.

Thibault admits this may be “less commercial” than a conventional organic regime, but in the long term he hopes it will prove better for the estate; although he is refreshingly honest enough to admit that, so far, it has not yet made a noticeable difference to the quality of the wine. A biodynamic Estate Malbec 2007 is already available at Waitrose (£14.99).