When I stepped onto the balcony and yawned, gauchos waved. These cowboys, I noticed, were not just waving, they were waving me down to join them. Even Baixinho, who I thought was furious with me. It was the morning of a big party, a churrasco, or barbecue, at the Fazenda Itú, a grand old cattle ranch in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.
The pampas begin here. Rolling flanks of grass are punctured by odd thrusts of mountain range left behind by glaciers grinding southward for the big Ice Age meet-and-melt that made much of neighboring Argentina as endlessly flat as our Great Plains. The shapes of these exotically isolated protuberances are fantastical: flat-topped hills, symmetrical Fujiyamas, Egyptian pyramids, forested buttes, and mounds that look artificially piled up, like the one painted by Claude Lorrain in his Sermon on the Mount.
When I reached the front door, which framed what looked like every gaucho on the place assembled in two rows as if for a class photograph, I was mystified. They were grinning and whispering, and staring my way. Were those bills they were gripping? Was some ceremony for newcomers about to take place? Was the novelty of my height and nationality (I was the first American many of them had seen offscreen) actually growing instead of receding with familiarity? Every eye was on me.
Over the previous couple of days, I had tried in my bad Portuguese to talk to them and, despite my terrible horsemanship, to ride with them. To show my solidarity, I had even assisted in the slaughtering of a hog for the churrasco (and watched laughing children with knives jump in to cut the ring from the late porker’s nose).
A pit of firewood had burned all night down to coals. Now it was surrounded by poles staking sides of beef and lamb and pork, eyed by little owls perched atop red termite mounds and by the inevitable nosy patrols of caracaras. Relatives of my host, important people from nearby São Borja, and other ranchers were on the way. In the face of such glamorous distractions, I was flattered to find so much attention focused on me. When I stepped through the doorway into the bright sunlight, I discovered why.
The day before, a mischievous boy named Edgar had played a trick on me. He had gotten me to cut a watermelon for him and a pal from a patch behind a shed. They immediately (and, in retrospect, suspiciously gleefully) sat down to eat it. I had no way of knowing that this garden was the property of Baixinho, the short cowboy who was already angry about my interference in a werewolf matter. (A few days earlier, when the gauchos had shown me a wild animal roped in the back of a wagon and announced that it was a werewolf, I had demurred, assuring them that it was simply a big black fox—and suggesting that it ought to be released. Baixinho was outraged. He said he had personally seen this creature change into human form several times before they finally captured it. Blondie, another gaucho, said that because I was American and a college graduate, they should listen to me. The indigo-eyed werewolf nodded in agreement. I said it was none of my business, just my opinion, and walked away. But Blondie told me they had eventually let the fox go.) Baixinho had approached in a rage, intending to punish the thieving boys, and Edgar, spitting seeds and covered with watermelon gore, had told him that I, the American guest, had given the watermelon to them. Baixinho looked at me with astonished, impotent fury. First his werewolf and now his watermelon—had I been sent there by the Devil to torment him?
Thus my confusion at seeing Baixinho grinning merrily in the center of the group waiting to greet me. When I finally stepped outside, a shout went up. Money started moving among the fists, stopping me in my tracks—which only seemed to increase the laughter. A droplet hit my ear. Then I saw that standing to my left, next to the doorway, on a stump, was the impish Edgar, pissing over my head. The question of whether or not a small boy could piss over a tall man was, I then realized, the basis for my enthusiastic reception on the morning of the big churrasco. And Baixinho was apparently a winner.
The horse-mounted guests, small as cloves in the distance, had begun to appear in the afternoon. The ones coming by car from São Borja appeared comparatively instantaneously. The sides and joints staked around the bed of fragrant coals under a coverlet of ash had been brushed all morning with bouquets of sage dipped in cans of salt water. Lambs and suckling pigs were added later. Delicacies requiring the least amount of cooking time were brought to the fire last.
One long table was covered with side dishes and bowls of farofa, the toasted manioc flour in which Brazilians love to dredge their meat. There were salads of potatoes and other tubers in mayonnaise whisked from the eggs of guinea hens. Beer flowed from a keg into the pewter mug of the ranch manager, into pitchers for the tables, and, finally, into the cowboys’ cups. Soda cans glittered as inappropriately in the gorgeous setting as the mayor’s wife’s ice-pink lipstick and overabundantly packed white-plastic Cacharel miniskirt.
“Seu Bill [Mr. Bill],” said Aristeu, the magnificent captain of the gauchos, who was drinking wine rather than beer. He offered me a cup. The beverage was poured from basket-girded jugs into the traditional Portuguese porcelain mugs called canecas. It was the perfect wine for the occasion.
Perhaps a 1970 Château Margaux would have been as good with the roasted, smoked, seasoned, and farofa-upholstered flesh of an unborn calf. (I apologize, especially to you mothers, but the truth is that this barbaric delicacy is delicious.) But neither could have been any better than what was in my cup. I was drinking the original South American wine.
“What is this?” I asked Aristeu.
“Wine,” he replied.
When I asked more sophisticated, or anyway urbanized, guests what wine it was, they didn’t get much more specific.
“It’s the wine that comes from here,” explained the mayor of São Borja.
“Do you know the name of the grape?”
“It was the one brought by the Portuguese, the bandeirantes, in the sixteenth century. I think it is called Isabella.”
It was as marvelous as the indigo-eyed fox, the cowboys, the landscape, and the food. And, being wine, it was not without a touch of mischief, like the laughing boy, Edgar.
That was decades ago. Now, in the gymnasium-size, halogen-blanched whiteness of the ballroom of the Park Hyatt in Mendoza, the wine capital of Argentina, I get a glimpse of just how far South American wine has come since my caneca of Isabella at Fazenda Itú in southern Brazil. It is the final day of Vinandino, a weeklong celebration of international premium wines held here every other year since 1993. Forty-two tasters sit at seven tables, each concentrating monkishly. There is no laughter, banter, or sense of community in this cathedral of sleek space. It is not unlike a roomful of students taking the SAT.
Later, at another kind of backstage—a small, all-male dinner at the chic villa from which Carlos Pulenta, the scion of one of Argentina’s oldest wineries, Trapiche, helped launch one of its newest and most spectacular, Salentein—I meet the country’s most revered winemaker, Don Raúl de la Mota. (“He got the ninety-four rating in ’92 from Robert Parker that changed the world’s view of Argentine wines,” three different guests inform me about the wise-looking octogenarian.) When, after a round of tasting that I don’t entirely spit away, I tell Don Raúl how astonished I am by the way wine has been transformed from a treat and selfish pleasure into a scored test, he enthusiastically agrees. We’re soon discussing Perón’s dictatorship, the fables of La Fontaine, the insidious effects of poverty on national behavior, and the extraordinary beauty of the woman we’d seen dancing the tango during the awards presentation the night before.
Mario yanzón, the master architect of Argentina’s grandest new wineries, famously answered a client who wondered if the project wasn’t getting a little too fabulous: “Do you want a work of art or a galpón?” (A galpón is a kind of rudimentary shed often found sheltering dismembered trucks and stray dogs looking for shade.) Yanzón’s Peñaflor winery is a work of art—a six-hectare, multilevel, subterranean theatrical experience of darkness, dramatically shaped spaces, brooding casks, and spotlit obras de arte. So is the Salentein winery, the cross-shaped complex at the foot of the Andes where four facilities, each one story above and one beneath the surface, join at a circular vault into which light cascades, creating a space that looks as suitable for high religious ceremony as it is for winemaking.
Architecture isn’t the only indication I see that the wine business in South America is spreading as extensively as Simón Bolívar hoped democracy would. At Laguiole, a wine-centric restaurant in Rio de Janeiro’s financial district, I ask for an exceptional Brazilian wine. José Augusto, a member of the 22-year-old Associação Brasileira de Sommeliers, makes what proves to be a fine suggestion: Tannat. Tannat, he says, is a grape from France via Uruguay that is undergoing a renaissance in Uruguayan winemaking. He thinks Dal Pizzol’s Brazilian version is every bit as good. It is excellent.
In São Paulo, Massimo, the great and extravagant figure behind his great and extravagant restaurant of the same name, tells me that there are not only well-written and popular wine columns in São Paulo’s two main newspapers but call-in wine shows on the talk-radio stations. “We seem to be particularly fond of sparkling wines. Chandon is having a great success making wines here.”
In Buenos Aires, journalist José de Alzaga serves two bottles of fine red wine before opening the really good stuff, Alto, from the Alta Vista winery, in Mendoza.
Alto is made from Malbec, the wonder grape of Argentina. In Chile, the storied grape is Carmenère. Whereas many other South American wineries came with the 19th-century Italian immigrations, Chile’s were begun decades earlier by wealthy Francophiles who had brought not just vines but experienced workers from Bordeaux. Protected by the Andes and the Pacific, Chile never got phylloxera, the root louse that wiped out most of the world’s vineyards at the end of the 19th century. As a result, Chile became a nursery and museum of lost grapes. Long presumed to be a form of Merlot, Carmenère wasn’t even correctly identified as a varietal from pre-phylloxera Bordeaux until 1991.
Malbec in Argentina. Carmenère in Chile. Tannat in Uruguay and Brazil.
“Tempranillo,” says José Alberto Zuccardi, head of one of Argentina’s largest family-owned wineries, La Agrícola. At his facility, the money seems to be going more into research and development than into architecture. “We like the Spanish and Italian grapes: Tempranillo, Torrontés, Bonarda, Sangiovese—all grown with organic techniques. I believe these are all possible new keys to the future export market.”
“Do you think Argentina will ever overtake you in exports of fine wine?” I ask the director general of a Chilean export group a few days later.
“The ’90s were our golden decade. Chile went from nothing to six hundred million dollars in exports. Argentina is just starting. They have terrible political problems. But of course, Argentina is very big.”
After tasting many very fine wines, touring dazzling wineries and picture-perfect vineyards, considering all the ambitious experiments with new grapes and styles, and tallying the massive foreign investment in the future of South American wine, I find it refreshing to accompany Djanir Guerra on a tour of his Rio Grande do Sul winery, Vinícola Chapadão (still subtitled “Guerra Brothers Inc.” on the business card, in honor of his father and uncle). There is no fancy French oak. One room is used as storage for his beer distribution business, which explains the empty cases of beer stacked around Guerra’s fishing boat. While an employee draws off a bottle of tinto for me, Guerra tells me how his Italian immigrant great-grandfather came here and built the place in 1889.
“He came from Vicenza. The Italians all made their own wine, but my grandfather had the first commercial winery. Chapadão is the oldest one in this part of Rio Grande do Sul. Do you know anybody who might like to invest? Joint venture?”
The wine Guerra gives me is just as I remembered it—even after so much time, even tasting it not at a feast but under the thatched roof of a roadside stand featuring roast chicken and homemade sausage. The roads in Rio Grande do Sul are paved now, but the view is the same: brilliant green upholstering a landscape of isolated, weirdly symmetrical hills under a bright blue sky. Cattle. Caracaras. The wine in my caneca is bluish red, new wine, a crude country brew nothing like the great ones. But it is as sentimentally appropriate as a happy memory coming into perfect focus. I had drunk this very wine before, at the Itú churrasco 35 years earlier.
Labels to look for
Much has changed in the vineyards and wineries of Chile and Argentina in recent years, but international consultants and 3-D labels notwithstanding, plenty of the region’s Malbecs, Carmenères, and Bonardas—and even Cabernet Sauvignons and Merlots—have great character.
- Achával Ferrer
- Altos Las Hormigas
- Arboleda
- BenMarco
- Bodega Norton
- Caliterra
- Casa Lapostolle
- Clos de los Siete
- Crios
- Errázuriz
- Kaiken
- Graffigna
- Lo Tengo
- Luca
- Mapema
- Montes
- Nativo
- Pascual Toso
- La Posta del Viñatero
- Seña
- Susana Balbo
- Terrazas de los Andes
- Tikal
- Trapiche
- Valentín Bianchi
- Veramonte
- Yacochuya