Mendoza: Total immersion in Argentinian wine

Argentina is the world's fifth-largest wine-producing country, and three-quarters of its wine is made in Mendoza. Photo / Thinkstock

For the past few days, the only exercise I've had, between sawing up slabs of steak, has been lifting goblets of mighty malbec.

The red wines, often weighing in with a 14 per cent alcohol content, are made with punch-packing grapes that are ripened slowly at the foot of the Andes. Heavy with tannins, they are laced with the scent of cinnamon, violets, plums, liquorice and cherries.

After a weekend in Mendoza, tasting and spitting wine before lunch and swallowing it during meals, I feel as though I have undergone a complete transfusion. If you were to cut me, I would gush purply malbec, made with a grape from St-Emilion in southwest France, introduced to Argentina in 1850.

Dark red, muscular and more than a match for meat, it's the grape that characterises Argentinian wine. Who knows which came first, the grape or the steak, but it's impossible to imagine one without the other.

Argentina is the world's fifth-largest wine-producing country, and three-quarters of its wine is made in Mendoza. There are about 500 wineries in the region. As soon as you step off the plane (probably from Buenos Aires, as Mendoza's is not an international airport), the vines begin.

In March, the annual Fiesta de la Vendimia takes place. This culminates in a riotously kitsch stage extravaganza at which the harvest queen, chosen from beauties representing the outlying districts, including Maipu, Lujan de Cuyo and San Rafael, is crowned. We were so busy in the bodegas of Lujan de Cuyo that we barely registered the largest wine festival in South America.

A million tourists, one for each resident, visit Mendoza every year, many for the festivities. But the serious drinking is done in the wineries and restaurants, rather than in the town. In the vineyards, the harvesters start early in the morning, snipping the perfectly formed bunches of malbec for what will become Terrazas' Afincado 2006.

Edged with palms, silver birches and quince trees laden with fat, furry yellow fruit on one side, and the Andes on the other, the vineyards must be among the most beautiful workplaces in the world. Some bodegas offer the chance to play at leisurely grape-picking. For those who earn their living from it, speed is everything, and there is no time for bacchanalian revelry.

There are several ways to immerse yourself in wine. I chose to have a malbec-grape scrub. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my upper arms being kneaded with gritty black grape seeds. In a room off the hammam-like courtyard at the Cavas Wine Lodge and Spa, the windows were open and the vines so close I could almost reach out and touch them.

The sun was setting on the Andes, and the rooftop barbecue chimneys of the adobe apartments, which appear to grow out of the vineyards, formed cowl-like silhouettes against the mountains.

As dusk turned into starry night, lights came on among the vines to guide guests to their beds. I, meanwhile, had had the seeds rinsed off and was now in a bath of red wine - or rather, hot water enriched with red vine extracts and organic essential oils to stimulate the circulatory system.

Another form of immersion: sleeping in Syrah. In the Terrazas wine lodge, each room is named after a grape. Used mainly by trade visitors to the winery, rooms in the luxurious ranch home can also be booked by tourists.

Across the courtyard, grapes are unloaded from lorries at all hours during the harvest; men in white wellies hose down the forecourt, and there is the heady smell of fermenting grapes. It's thrilling to be so close to the creation of a vintage.

This winery - stainless-steel fermentation tanks in a late-19th-century building - produced the first Terrazas vintage in 1996. Wines such as the Afincado, made with malbec grapes from a single vineyard planted in 1929, are aged for 18 months in French oak barrels.

Even more exclusive, Cheval des Andes, a blend of cabernet sauvignon, malbec and petit verdot grapes made the Bordeaux way, costs 260 Argentinian pesos ($140) for the 2002 vintage. Three-quarters of Terrazas' wines are exported.

Conversely, you'll probably only ever drink Chandon in South America; very little is sold elsewhere. The word is that it was so popular when it was available in the US that it was in danger of undermining sales of the French original, Moet & Chandon.

These sparkling wines, made by Terrazas' older sister company in Argentina, have been around since 1959, pre-dating much of the current wave of wine activity by about 40 years, and are so successful that they account for 70 per cent of the country's sparkling wine. You can live high on the hog in Argentina, popping bottles of Baron B, the blingiest of Chandon's various styles, for about 40 Argentinian pesos ($22) a go.

Chandon's bodega is one of the most accessible, and popular, for tours. With little hedges and lawns as neat as those of any country club surrounding the pavilions, and with the Andes on the horizon, it offers a taste of the high life to anyone passing. Visitors holding half-full flutes wander around looking underdressed.

If you visit the second-generation family-run Bodega Familia Zuccardi, you can taste a tempranillo. The family were the first in Argentina to grow the viognier grape, and have planted Italian varieties, including the tempranillo and sangiovese.

It's yet another example, contrary to the expectations of the first-time visitor to Argentina, of how much more influence the Italian immigrants to Mendoza had on wine and food than the Spanish.

The palette of ingredients and flavours is reassuringly familiar at the Francis Mallmann 1884 restaurant, named after its owner, the top Argentine chef.

The "1884" refers to the year that the former winery was built - coincidentally also the year that the British-built railway arrived in Mendoza. In 1861, most of the then 300-year-old city was destroyed by an earthquake, so late 19th century, a time of hectic immigration, is as old as anything in Mendoza ever is.

At Mallmann's you can eat really well, and drink from one of the best wine lists in the country, in a high-ceilinged, informally baronial setting or in the outdoor courtyard, for less than gastropub prices.

In the kitchen, visible through a large window, handsome chefs - nothing unusual there, everyone in Argentina is outrageously good looking - cook appetising tapas such as courgette and cheese bruscetta and fava beans with chilli; classic risotto and pasta; and an exquisite lemon tart. Huge main courses of sweetbreads, veal kidneys, even goat, emerge on trenchers from the wood-fired oven.

Relatives of the Zuccardi family run one of the most charming and also distinctly Italian places to eat in the region. Based in a 100-year-old farmhouse at Almacen del Sur, they grow more or less organic vegetables, including piquillo peppers, and bottle most of them, preserving those South American flavours.

They also make inspired use of their produce in the kind of cafe you'd give your eye teeth to have at the end of your road. They may advertise a "Guided Tour & Fancy Lunch", but what makes it so good is that it isn't fancy, just deliciously simple.

Chicken-liver pate is matched with rose-petal chutney and balsamic-onion dressing; a bread-crumbed fritter of tuna is partnered with piquillo pepper; and the inevitable but still welcome beef is followed by pear puree, malbec jelly and panna cotta ice cream.

But it isn't all beef and malbec in Mendoza.

Forty-five minutes into the Andes there's white-water rafting. And 25km further west is Vallecitos, a 3000m-altitude skiing resort.

Keep going towards Chile and you'll reach a peak double that height, Cerro Aconcagua.

But that's a long way from a sybarite's wine holiday.

- INDEPENDENT