An interview with Dr Laura Catena
Searching for gold in the vineyards of Argentina
Firstly, there was definitely a culture of not feeling like we knew everything. Even if we have been making wine since the 16th century, there was a real humility. My great grandfather had said to my father, Argentina is a great place to make wine, but don’t ever think you can challenge the French, because they have this thing called terroir and nobody else has it. And my father Nicolás believed him. But when he went to the US, he saw that the Californians thought they had terroir too and could make top wines. He was very inspired by Mondavi and by the Judgment of Paris, because he said that challenging the French was something that could be done. That’s when he decided to aim for the same in Argentina. At the time, everyone wanted to emulate Chile.
My father refused this type of commodity business, because as an economist, he realised that California was doing a luxury business that was much more sustainable. Technology was also a very important milestone. We were using a lot of very antiquated equipment brought by the Italians in the 19th and early 20th century. The third major milestone was understanding terroir. I often tell a story about Jacques Lurton, which I think changed the opinion on high-altitude winegrowing. In the late 1980s, we took him a bottle of Cabernet-Sauvignon from the Primera Zona area in Maipu. Jacques told my father it reminded him of a very nice Cabernet Sauvignon from the Languedoc. Coming from a Bordelais, my father took this as an insult. He returned to Argentina and decided to change everything. We began planting vineyards in 1992 and 1993 in Gualtallary.
My father had discovered the concept of cool climate winegrowing, but the focus was still more on the temperature. Obviously we now recognise that we have terroir and that wines from different sites taste different, but in the 1990s it wasn’t obvious. It was widely thought at the time that there was more terroir in Burgundy than there was in the whole of Australia, for example. We studied 24 different parcels in different parts of Mendoza over three years – it’s the largest terroir study ever done. For half of the parcels, I could give winemakers the wine, not tell them where it came from and they could identify the wine. Demonstrating terroir is important because it creates unique expressions that are worth drinking and also makes you part of the upper echelons of wine. I’m sure the differences we found in Mendoza exist in other provinces. That’s my next project. There’s not a lot of water left in Mendoza so we’re looking at Patagonia, La Rioja, Salta…
I wrote ‘Gold in the Vineyards’ which is the story of the 12 most famous vineyards in the world. I really do think that families are a pivotal aspect because they have a long-term view and are not doing this for profit. They have patience and can also do crazy things and you do need people with a bit of an ego, something to prove. You need someone almost monastic, and then a family to honour that person. You want to maintain that vision, regardless of what happens. You’re going to have terrible years, with frost and hail, and the economy in Argentina is a disaster every three years. The reason you cope with this is because of the vision of somebody that you cannot let down. You also have to have a degree of luck – going to Gualtallary could have been a bad decision, there is frost, it was very cold – but my father got lucky.
In the 20-50 year term, I think that most regions will be able to keep even the same varieties they have now because of newer technologies. In Mendoza, we addressed climate change 25 years ago. My father moved our vineyards and that basically created this exodus from the region. In the 1990s, 80% of the wine was made in the east of Mendoza, the warmer region, and 20% in Gualtallary. Now it’s the exact opposite.
Through weather stations in our five vineyards in the Uco Valley we analysed the temperature and it has got cooler over the last 20 years. But in the east and the primera zona, it’s getting hotter. The big problem in Argentina is not whether it’s hot or cold, it’s the water shortage and that’s why we’re planting in other parts of Argentina. Firstly because we want to find the Washington State and the Oregon of Argentina. I think they can be found. And we also think we can bring prosperity to those regions if we can make fine wine there. Other interesting regions are the high altitude parts of La Rioja, near Chañarmuyo. Salta has some great locations, so does Patagonia, which is not cooler than Mendoza because it’s not at high altitude, but it has a lot of water
The biggest project is maintaining the genetic diversity of Malbec. We have hundreds of different genetic cuttings of Malbec – and not just Malbec, also Cabernet-Sauvignon, Bonarda, Chardonnay, Criolla etc. Most of the world went to mega clones after phylloxera, but Argentina didn’t because we’re like an island. No plant material was imported into Argentina for about 100 years, until the 1990s. Phylloxera never really materialised in Argentina – we have it but it doesn’t propagate. I’m afraid it might so one of the big topics of research at the Institute was phylloxera, of which we have the most aggressive strain.
Argentina has kept very diverse genetic material and I think that with climate change, we’re going to need all those genes. It’s also vital for any new diseases that might come around – we’ve seen what happened with Covid. A lot of Argentineans thought we didn’t have viruses but we do. Also, our genetic diversity gives us a whole other palette, on top of the terroir influence.
I’d like to make two comparisons. One is with Pinot noir – it never occurs to anybody that Burgundy should plant something other than Pinot noir. There’s so much diversity. We don’t just have the diversity of terroir, but also the unrivalled genetic diversity of Malbec, which you don’t have in France because there are mainly a couple of Côt clones. Hubert de Vilaine from La Romanée Conti was the person who made me realise what a jewel we had with our massal selection. My intention was to talk about our Pinot noir vineyard and when I told him proudly we have the Dijon clones, he said, that’s terrible, you can’t make any great wine with them. He said you need massal selection, and when I told him we had this with Malbec, he told me it was amazing. He said that in Burgundy there were very few of this type of vineyard and that they were trying to find genetic diversity again. He told me that’s what we needed to work on. Hubert de Vilaine had the same impact as Jacques Lurton. In a way, I’m very grateful to French people because their honesty has helped me a lot.
I think it’s now its own person. It’s like a third-generation immigrant in say the US – they’re more American than say French or English. It’s been in Argentina for over 150 years, it has adopted the local terroir. At UC Davis, we compared some of the Malbec clones to Côt and we found that most likely, Malbec from Argentina had epigenetic changes that allowed it to withstand more sunlight. So certain genes turned on to combat UV emission were more numerous in the Argentine high-altitude cuttings than in the vines from France. You cannot think of Malbec as one grape variety, it’s like a whole village compared with a single family. It’s like a chocolate dessert made by 500 chefs as opposed to a mass-produced one from a single recipe. The question about it being over-simplistic is a very valid one that people often ask us and we need to answer it. So far, we have not done such a great job of telling this story of Argentina. That’s the purpose of my book, Malbec Mon Amour.
I see myself as a link in the chain and Catena means chain in Italian. I’m continuing the work of my grandfather and my father to elevate Argentine wines. My goal is to show that we don’t need to move on to another variety because Malbec is a 2,000-year-old variety that survived for a reason. It nearly became extinct three times – twice in France and once in Argentina. Before my father started making high-end Malbec, 80% of Malbec had been pulled out and replaced by more productive varieties. So my work is about not falling prey to the desire to move on to something else and showing the world that there is so much more about Malbec than people know. My goal in my lifetime is that every collector’s cellar in the world should have an Argentine wine in it. I don’t care if it’s my wine. If I can achieve that, then I’ve done my job.
Firstly, French consultants have made a huge contribution to Argentina. People like Michel Rolland, who is fanatical about Argentina, with Clos de los Siete, Chandon, the people at Alta Vista etc. I think that France has always loved Argentina, even more than it has Chile. We are now selling wines for Europe and Asia through France’s negociant network, the Place de Bordeaux. This connection with France is not just about winemaking and viticulture but also how to sell a high-end, luxury product from people like our partners at DBR Lafite. France is the master at that. France has a lot to give to the rest of the world and the negociants bringing in wines from around the world is a really good development.
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