Torrontés and high-altitude wine: the Cafayate wine experience

Torrontés is the wine you will be poured first in Cafayate, and it has a better origin story than most. Argentina's wine authority, the INV, recognises three different Torrontés varieties: Riojano, Sanjuanino and Mendocino.⁶ The one that matters here is Torrontés Riojano, an aromatic white grape that makes a dry wine with distinctive terpene aromas, compounds also found in flowers and citrus peel.¹

For a long time people assumed it was a Spanish grape, and Salta's tourism ministry still describes it as a variety brought from Spain that found a unique expression in Salta soil.⁷ The INV tells a more interesting story. Attempts to link the Argentine grape to the Spanish Torrontés failed.⁸ DNA work concluded, with a high degree of probability, that the old Torrontés vines descend from a cross between Muscat of Alexandria and Listán Prieto.²

So the parents came from Europe, but the child was born in the Americas. That is why Argentines treat Torrontés as their own, and why the INV calls the Riojano type the one of highest winemaking quality.⁹ It also adapts to every growing zone, the report adds, and especially to the high ones of the northwest.¹⁰ Cafayate is where that adaptation is easiest to taste: the grape and the valley suit each other unusually well.

The phrase on every label here is high-altitude wine, and the numbers back it up. Vineyards in the Calchaquí Valleys rise from 1,600 to 3,100 m above sea level.³ The INV's regional report notes that vines in the northwest are grown in irrigated valleys and in some cases above 3,300 m.²⁵ Up here the air is thinner, the sunlight harder and the nights sharp, and every one of those conditions shows up in the glass.

That last point is the key. Salta's tourism ministry credits the wide gap between day and night temperatures, together with the soil, for wines with concentrated aromas, flavours and colour.²⁶ In the valleys the swing between noon and night runs 10 to 15 °C.²⁷ Warm days ripen the fruit, cold nights keep its acidity and perfume, and the result is a white that smells intense yet tastes fresh.

The ground does its part too. Around Cafayate the vines root in loose sand that lets rain run straight through, which keeps them thirsty and pushes sugar into the berries.²⁸ Flecks of mica bounce the sunshine upward, so the bunches are heated from the ground as well as the sky.²⁹ Add a dry, temperate climate that the ministry calls ideal for Torrontés and its red companions, and you have the reason so many wineries cluster in such a small valley.²¹

Wine is not new in the valley. The INV's report on the northwest states that the oldest vineyards in Argentina are in Salta province and date from 1862.³⁷ A slow tasting is the best way to hear how a cellar's rows came to be planted, so give a small cellar more time than a big one.

Down the valley, the craft side of wine is very much alive. Animaná keeps the oldest winery in the area, more than 70 years old.³⁸ There, and in San Carlos, visitors can see or join the making of vino patero, wine from grapes trodden by foot.^24,39 A project for a homemade and artisanal wine route also promotes local styles such as mistela, a sweet drink of grape must fortified with alcohol before it ferments.²³

Small does not mean marginal. Salta exports 1.5 million litres of wine to 30 countries, almost 10% of Argentina's total.⁴⁰ The province's wine route brings together more than 60 providers, from wineries to hotels and food producers.⁴¹ And the tourism ministry ranks Salta as Argentina's second wine tourism destination.⁴² For a visitor that means the doors are open: big estates, tiny cellars and everything between.