When it comes to wine, Argentina is the world’s fifth largest producer of wine after Italy, France, Spain and the USA and has one of the fastest growing wine industries on the globe.
Around 450 years ago, early Spanish conquistadores planted the first vineyards in Argentina to make wines for the celebration of Mass, and inaugurated a long history of winemaking, and drinking, in Argentina, probably the oldest winemaking country of the New World.
A few years later, in 1816, the country’s independence was declared. Spanish rule was over, but the winemaking tradition was kept: locals had already developed a taste
for wine, and it was no longer drunk only in church, and least of all just on Sundays...
Subsequent immigration also contributed to the potential of this land’s current wine scene. Argentina now boasts one of the world’s most diverse range of grape varieties, as people brought rootstocks from their towns in France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Germany, to name a few. Amongst them are Torrontés, the favourite indigenous white grape of Argentina, and the champion of this country’s wine revolution, Malbec, an old and little known French cépage that chose the high altitude terroirs by the majestic Andes as a better place to live.
