505: Edy Del Popolo Escaped From the Fruit

[00:00:00] 1980s Red Bordeaux from top names are often wondrous today, fully mature and seamless. To show you what I mean, I'll be opening up several top wines from excellent vintages of the 1980s on November 16th in New York City. Aubriant, Chevalbon, Chateau Margaux, De Creux Boucailloux, Chateau Latour and more examples will be poured from the 1980s and there will also be legendary wines from the famous 1990

[00:00:28] vintage poured at the same dinner from the likes of Montrose and La Mission Aubriant. You can join me for this one of a kind dinner in Manhattan by going to alldrinktothatpod.com, selecting the wine dinners tab and then purchasing your seed. I'll be speaking about the wines and we'll all have a chance to enjoy great examples of classic mature red Bordeaux together. Come join me on November 16th, go to alldrinktothatpod,

[00:00:57] i-l-l, drinktothat, p-o-d, dot com and then select the wine dinners tab to secure your spot and I will see you there. I'm Levi Dalton and this is all drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the wine business.

[00:01:31] Edito Papalo, the viticulturalist for Perse and also Susana Balbo and Mendoza Argentina is on the show today. Hello sir, how are you? Thank you for having me. Ah, it's nice to have you here. So you were born in Mendoza in 1966? Yes, I was born in Mendoza in 1966. The French side of my grandparents, that means my grand-grandparents and grand-uncles,

[00:01:56] they came first to Chile. So they, for certain reason, they couldn't establish themselves in Chile and they crossed the Andes by horse. They had a very sacrificial life. So crossing the Andes, they lost one of their children in the way coming to Mendoza. When they found Mendoza, they established themselves in the plains of Maipú, one of the regions of Mendoza,

[00:02:22] where they started working as wine buying contractors. And they had a quite hard life. I had a picture of seeing my grand-uncles, how they worked. And I used to accompany them to the vineyards to see how they do.

[00:02:42] And coming back in the sunset to have a big bowl of soup. They love soup with a lot of pepper. I remember how they like the black pepper. And I had the image of their very large and rough hands, cutted by the very hard work they do, they did. This is something that I could not forget. I remember them making everything for themselves.

[00:03:12] They were very, you know, even living in the poverty, they were very self-sufficient. So they made all their preserves, tomato preserves, peaches preserves. They did the cured ham and meats, sausages, salami. They had their own fresh eggs and vegetables.

[00:03:34] And I remember very well, another picture that I have from my great uncle is to making his own hand-rolled cigarettes with tobacco, with the kind of fingers painted by the brown color tobacco. So trying to imitate him, I used to go above a pile of canes and I cut in some canes and I smoked them with my brother and my cousin. It was pretend smoking. It wasn't like you lit them on fire.

[00:04:05] You would put them to your mouth and kind of pretend to be smoking, right? Exactly. I admire very much the simple eye of them and the way that you... I used to accompany them as well to see how they prune, how they tend the vines, how they tie them, how they plough the soils and how they prepare the little canals for the full irrigation. Everything was made by hand at the time. I'm talking about the early 70s.

[00:04:29] And the vines that they tended at that time were that we call the French espaliers. It's a kind of small, petite espalier planted with Malbec. At that time, the Malbec was known as Francesa. Francesa means the French. And it's a mix of different grape varieties where Malbec was the main protagonist of the varieties.

[00:04:55] But it was also intermingled with Cabernet-Frank, Tanat, Bonarda, Cabernet-Sauvignon, all together. And in the 70s, Malbec used to be called Francesa or Malbec. But the end of the word was CK. Today is Malbec just with C at the end.

[00:05:17] And that was a very interesting way of life where the Malbec was the main grape. Living there in our vineyards as a survivor was the best performing grape variety among the rest of the varieties. What would a vineyard have looked like in the 70s in Argentina typically, in Maipo? What did the vineyard look like?

[00:05:43] The vineyards looked like in the 70s high trellis, parral. We called parrals high trellis dominated by mostly Criolla varieties. This was a big component of the Mendoza viticulture, that kind of trellis system.

[00:06:06] The VSP, the small espaliers were part of the vineyards as well, but not as important or dominant like the parral were. Probably in the 70s, more than 60 to 70 percent of the total vineyard acreage was dominated by parral and 35, 40 percent by VSP.

[00:06:28] Malbec was the main grape variety growing, mostly in the plains from Maipo and Luján de Cuyo to the east. Mendoza used to have in the 70s 250,000 hectares, where Argentina in total was about 300,000 hectares. And production went down in the mid-80s because of the crisis. A lot of hectares of Malbec were put out.

[00:06:58] I remember going from 60,000 hectares of Malbec in the 70s and 80s to 9,000 hectares in the late 80s. And that's because of hyperinflation, economic problems? Well, it was coincidentally with the hyperinflation, but it was a consumption crisis. And consumptions went down and nobody at that time used to drink red wines.

[00:07:25] And because the consumption was based in domestic consumption, we didn't export any wine at the time. The consumption went down for red wines and it was more concentrated in white. So I remember some wineries making white Malbec to sell the wines. So the acreage of Malbec went down heavily and it was just recovered at the end of the 90s

[00:07:54] when Argentina started exporting wines and the consumption of Malbec started to grow. So we planted Malbec from the late 90s until nowadays. And now the current surface of Malbec is about 50,000 hectares in Argentina. So what happened in between those two things was there was a politician named Menin who came into power in 89.

[00:08:20] And he brought up an idea of more free market, Western-based capitalist moves. So he made it much more attractive for foreign businesses to do business in Argentina by the early 90s, right? Absolutely. I think it was a period of internationalization of Argentina, a period that started in the late 80s or early 90s with a change of the government to Menin and companies.

[00:08:49] Well, we got a lot of investment and the companies are starting to explore foreign markets and exporting their products. Not only wine, but wine was part of that. And that actually coincides with when you graduate from school. So you graduate from college in 91 and that's when Menin has recently passed some reforms that make it more attractive for foreign businesses to invest in Argentina and do wineries. And so it's kind of an amazing coincidence.

[00:09:17] I mean, on one level, you're kind of the first generation of university-trained analogist viticulturalist in Argentina, give or take. And then on another level, in a way that you really couldn't have predicted, the investment level of what needs to be planted and why has totally changed. Absolutely.

[00:09:38] So when I was 13 years old, more or less, my mother, who was my, I recognized her as my first mentor, gave me an advice. You need to go to the agricultural college because the future of our country and our province lies in agriculture. So you are good for agriculture. You need to go.

[00:10:03] So I followed her advice and I went to the college where I got the degree of enologist. So I'm an enologist first. And continuing my projection, I decided to go into the university and I studied agronomy. So, and after leaving the university, I started looking for a job. And that was actually after the wine crisis.

[00:10:32] I wanted to dedicate my life to work in the farm. And fruit production was something that I really liked to do, like growing apples or peaches. But my first job was, I was offered to be a junior junior manager at the company that was established for a long time in Mendoza. It's a local company, but it's a descendant company from an Italian family called Gansia.

[00:11:03] Gansia was based in the Pimonte and they had a big business for sparkling Asti Spumante, but they also had a big business for vermouth that was consumed in Argentina, right? There was a huge consumption of vermouth in Argentina in the 70s and 80s and Gansia was the leading brand. So they used to make this kind of aperitif. And I started working with them in 1992.

[00:11:28] I remember the first year was quite tough because we had a frost in November the 5th of 1992. So my first year of being a viticulturalist at Gansia, we didn't have any harvest to work with. So it was very challenging. And it was a time that we learned a lot.

[00:11:53] I remember my second mentor working in Gansia was Rodolfo Perinetti, a very knowledgeable engineer. I remember how practical and skilled he was in times where technology wasn't still very common for the vineyards. And you had to do everything by yourself. So I remember it was a kind of MacGyver. He did everything.

[00:12:20] And I remember one of the first days in my job when we went together to the farm and we were growing in plantings. We were planting mostly Chardonnay for sparkling. So he gave me the optical level and said, Eddie, you need to measure things here in the farm because we are going to plant. It was like 50 hectares.

[00:12:48] And I said, what the hell of this? So that was very, very fun and very interesting beginning of my career at Gansia. It was a period of plenty of learning for me. And I did it in a kind of transformative period where we went from the typical small espaliers, French espaliers,

[00:13:16] to the more wider spacing vineyards where the vineyards were planted in the beginning of the 70s at much wider distances. I remember going from 1.5 meters between rows and 1 meter between vines to 2.7 meters by 2 meters. So from 6,000 to 7,000 vines per hectare to less than 2,000 vines per hectare.

[00:13:44] It was completely different when we compared. So it was a viticulture in a more technical view when in the past the viticulture was more kind of artisanal. And technology started in our fields in both, in vineyards and also in wineries. And it was a completely different period.

[00:14:12] Some of the things Gansia introduced were drip irrigation instead of flood irrigation. So instead of channels of water that are dug in agricultural areas, they introduced drip irrigation, which is what you generally see in vineyards today in most parts of the world, although there's still some flood irrigation in Argentina. And then they also introduced trellising and training for machine harvesting, right? So it's kind of the beginning of technology into the vineyard side in Argentina. LeBron, that's time. It was the beginning.

[00:14:42] And I consider Rodolfo as one of the pioneers. I remember when I was still in the university doing some visits to vineyards planted by well-known viticulturalists, because Rodolfo's vineyards were probably one of the most visited. And he was a pioneer introducing drip irrigation in the mid-80s. That was pretty early. And also the mechanical harvest there.

[00:15:09] So that was the kind of viticulture we had in between the mid-80s to the mid-90s. Then things started to change again in the mid-90s. It was a period where wine was conceived like the fruit of the vineyards, but not because of the site. It was because it was a Malbec planted wherever, and you had to make the wine at the winery.

[00:15:38] The winery technology and the knowledge and talent of the winemakers were responsible to make a good quality wine. That was what happened in between the mid-80s and mid-90s. And nobody paid attention on the site. The site is something that came later, probably in the late 90s and early 2000s, where there was a kind of integration

[00:16:07] in between enologist and viticulturalist. That's because in the past, what the enologist used to do is to work just in the cellars and probably in the labs, but not very much linked with the vineyards. Enologists and viticultors were playing different games.

[00:16:34] Enologists were based on the cellar and labs, and they didn't leave the cellar to go to the vineyards. And the viticultors, they did pretty the same, because they used to work in the vineyards, and during the harvest time, it's like they delivered the grapes to the winery, and they say, it's your job now to the enologist. And I think it was an interesting, transformative change

[00:17:01] when I think my generation, people from my age, let's see five to ten years younger or older, we started integrating winemaking and viticulture, learning one from the other. And it was a nice change because enologists started learning about soil, vines, the way we cultivate.

[00:17:30] And we started paying attention more to the winemaking process rather than technology, the way they make wine. And it was a very important change in our lives and the way we conceive wine. So something that happened in the mid-90s is that you shifted from Gancha, which was focused on sparkling wine, and you went to Dona Paula, which was a project owned by Santa Rita in Chile. So they had invested pretty heavily.

[00:17:59] And one of the things that happened is that you ended up planting a lot of vineyards for them in a lot of different places. And so this gave you a real kind of hands-on experience of different parts of growing areas of Argentina. Yes. Yes. After learning how to tend vineyards and how to develop and design vineyards at Gancha, I started working for Dona Paula.

[00:18:26] And it was a tremendous experience working for them to decide how to plant and where to plant. So I had the opportunity to plant vineyards almost everywhere in Mendoza, from the Uco Valley to Luján de Cuyo. I remember planting blocks of 10 hectares each. That is today the total size of my vineyard, less than 10 hectares.

[00:18:52] So that is the comparison between 30 years ago to our current reality. So you planted about 800 hectares in total. During the Gancha time, I planted close to 300. In Dona Paula, yes, roughly 800 hectares because we started from scratch. I developed all the vineyards in the Uco Valley and Luján

[00:19:18] and also helped to develop other projects in and outside of Mendoza. So probably more than 1,500 hectares. And at one point, Dona Paula, who wanted to grow pretty quickly, asked you to plant about 150 hectares in a year, right? At one year. Yeah, I remember it was the first year. They came quite late with the investment. They purchased the land in the month of August, September in 97.

[00:19:47] And they spoke to me to plant 150 hectares. At that time, there were not enough plants. The nurseries sold out all the vines. So I started looking for vines and I couldn't find them. So they say, okay, just plant the rustog and then we're going to graft. The way is made in California. And it's not an easy way.

[00:20:16] I had a good experience grafting vineyards in Gansia, but just under a small amount of vines grafted, like 10,000 to 15,000 grafts in a year, it's difficult to graft a vineyard and passing the climate adversities. So you had a lot of problems with winds, especially the zonda winds. The zonda is a hot wind.

[00:20:46] It blows quite strong and it also brings dust. Yeah, and it breaks a lot of shoots. So when you do grafting, you had a lot of problems trying to protect the new shoots growing from the zonda wind especially. So imagine to graft 120 hectares is insane. So at the end of the day, I could find vines for 60 hectares.

[00:21:14] So I just had to graft 60 hectares of the 120. So there was like 300,000 graftings. But luckily I was successful because 95% of them could survive and it was something hard in my multicultural life, but we were succeeded. Kind of a crucible moment. Probably gave you a lot of confidence, right? Yeah, absolutely.

[00:21:44] But that also speaks to the kind of expansion that was happening in Argentina for wine in the 90s. Someone wants to plant 150 hectares in a year. One company. It wasn't too common. I think most of the wineries and vineyard owners used to plant 10, 20, 30 hectares, but 150 in a year. And then I continued planting more vineyards. I purchased land for the company to plant

[00:22:13] something like 160 hectares in Gualtallari. And I developed those vineyards in just two years. When I asked Master of Wine Sandy Block about the wine market changes that stood out in the last several decades, he highlighted the move to varietal labeling and the quick rise of Argentina as some of the most notable shifts.

[00:22:41] One of the major trends I saw was the development of Chile and Argentina a little bit later. But Chile in the early mid-90s, Australia in the mid-90s, and then Argentina after late 90s. And these were wine regions that, prior to their taking off, would have been very hard to foresee because they would be as weird as if today somebody said, you know,

[00:23:10] hey, Lithuania is really the place. You know, or it's just off everybody's radar screen. Maybe a little bit less so with Chile because Lafitte had bought Los Vascos in 1988. But those were eye-openers, how quickly they happened and how dramatically they affected things. It's understandable that a rapid escalation in investment and vineyard plantings in Argentina would then lead to a big new source of additional bottles for sale globally.

[00:23:39] The market embrace of Malbec in export markets like the United States, that was the big unknown. But there was reason to believe that Americans might be receptive, as Patricio Tapia described in episode 413 of this program. Patricio is the author of The Descort Chados Guide to South American Wines, and he discussed the situation for Argentinian Malbec circa 2005-ish, and then also spoke about

[00:24:08] how some approaches to Malbec had shifted within Argentina by about 2017. I was really impressed how nice, approachable can be Malbec. I wasn't surprised about the success of Malbec, especially in this country. It was logic for me, you know, such an adorable, easy-to-understand grape made an impact in this market. So those were the news. But nowadays,

[00:24:37] a lot of things are happening. In Argentina, I'm totally into this new idea of Malbec as a great interpretation of terroir. They're really into these high-altitude wines, so you can really see how Malbec reacts when it goes up in the mountains, to Bungato, while Tallarima, all the Uco Valley towards the mountains, and also when Malbec grows near the river.

[00:25:05] And so you can get all these new flavors that in the past were totally, you know, behind the extraction, the oak, and the ego of the people who were making it. Now things are changing, and there's this beautiful new generation of Malbec. First of all, with Malbec, the harvest window of Malbec is huge. So you can pick one day, or you can pick two months later. Depends on what you want.

[00:25:34] Back in the days of Roland's influence and Paul Hobbes' influence, which wines were really success in this market, and made a strong influence on all the other producers in Argentina, back in those days, they will tell you, no, Malbec needs to be really ripe. And so you need to harvest really late. Why? Since Malbec doesn't have pyrazines that, for example, Cabernet Sauvignon has, or Cabernet Franc has. Why is that?

[00:26:02] This guy started thinking Malbec from another perspective, you know. Harvesting earlier, they discovered that they didn't find any vegetal notes. They discovered that new flavors, new fruit flavors, new red fruit flavors that were totally hidden with, you know, this over-extraction and over-ripeness. So a whole new world opened at that moment. And people like Vigil, Alejandro Vigil in Catena, Matias Michelini,

[00:26:31] again, in his own project, Passionate Wine, it's called his project, Juan Pablo Michelini in Sorsal, another nice name to keep on mind, are doing that. And the results are great. I mean, I love Malbec because of that. Patricio then mapped the different approaches to Malbec to different sub-regions and growing areas within Argentina, and that's helpful to understand. Well, 70% of the wines are produced in Mendoza. Mendoza and satellites, you know, San Juan, San Rafael,

[00:27:02] all that area, which is the most, by far the most important area in Argentina. There, Malbec is king. You have these amazing results and amazing differences between what is produced in Agrelo, which is the most traditional zone area in Mendoza, where all the, really old vines are, and all the big names are located. And that's near the river, near the river,

[00:27:30] with a lot of sandy soils and pebbles, and a very good site for Malbec. If you want to go for this ripe, you know, supple Malbec, that's the best place to do it. If you're wise enough and don't overripe your grapes, you will get one of the most balanced Malbecs in Argentina. Beautiful wines from Agrelo. I love Agrelo. Lujan de Cuyo, in general, is that traditional area where the best Malbec that came into this market came from.

[00:28:00] Lujan de Cuyo is the place. And then, when you go out for Lujan de Cuyo, you go to Valle de Uco, which is the highest part of Mendoza. And there, you have Altamira, for example, Guadalajari, those names that start now to sound a little bit because of these guys, like Vigil and Catena, like Sorsal, and others. And there, there is something different. There you have Cholqui soils. Mainly, this huge presence of the mountains there,

[00:28:29] like a big monster, you know. And then, this desert, you know, just coming down from the Andes. And there, you get some of the most exciting Malbecs are coming from that area, but from specifically chalky, sandy, gravelly soils. Some of the best Malbecs right now are produced from grapes in this particular area of Uco. After the break, Eddie Del Popolo will discuss planting in those exciting

[00:28:57] higher elevation areas. I talk to winemakers all the time. And something they tell me is that oxygen management is a key to aging wine. Finding the right balance is crucial. And that's why I recommend Diem's revolutionary cork closures. With Diem corks, winemakers can achieve precisely controlled oxygen management after a bottle leaves the winery, ensuring a wine that matures gracefully

[00:29:27] and reaches its full potential. With over 2 billion Diem corks sold each year, it's clear that winemakers worldwide trust Diem for consistent results. And Diem has recently expanded the permeability options for their popular Diem 10 and Diem 30 closures, providing winemakers with even more flexibility to choose a cork that will guarantee the kind of wine life they envision. Banish surprise dud bottles

[00:29:56] and embrace Diem closures. Your customers will thank you. In North America, Diem products are exclusively distributed by G3 Enterprises. Ready to ensure the lifespan of your wines? Go to diem-closures.com forward slash IDTT to learn more. That's D-I-A-M dash closures with an S dot com forward slash IDTT

[00:30:25] for more information. Today, Guatallari is a place that a lot of people speak of as quite good. But at the time, I believe it was less known, right? It was a marginal site where if you go at that time it was just planted with walnuts, some beans, plenty of riverbeds and creeks and the

[00:30:54] Lomas de Guatallari, the Guatallari hills. Guatallari in the beginning was not the place well considered to plant vineyards. And the pioneers that came first to Guatallari that was in the early 90s, 93, 94, they looked for the altitude to plant the vineyards. So the main consideration these times were going high close to the mountains to

[00:31:23] have the benefits of the cool climate. And years later I came in 2005 when I needed to plant the vineyard for Doña Paula and we pay attention not only for the benefits of the climate but also for the quality of the soils. Soils extremely poor but with something that is transcendental for the viticulture

[00:31:53] nowadays that is the calcareous on the soils. The amount of granitic soils, pebbles and calcareous. Which is an unusual combination. In a lot of other places in the world I don't find calcareous soils which chalk limestone would be calcareous soils next to granite in the same place but there's this kind of weird amalgamation of those two

[00:32:25] thing where over time they've actually kind of bonded where partially it's granite and partially it's calcareous. Yes, yes. Gueltadari is a place that is about 2,800 hectares planted with vineyards and probably more than 10 years ago they dig a lot of soil pits calicatas in the different parts of Gueltadari measuring the amount

[00:32:55] of calcareous in the soil so the way of measuring calcareous is talking about grams of calcium carbonate every 100 grams of soil so from 12 to 25 percent is the increase of calcareous content going up to 20 25 percent it's a huge amount

[00:33:24] if you consider and you compare with other wine regions in the world it's important so we needed to play with calcareous and we never know how to play with calcareous because we were not accustomed to to work in these kind of soils and also the nights are cool right and at night it gets cold in Guantari yeah probably the most important factor is climate I always say climate first soil second climate

[00:33:54] is something really interesting in Guantari because in just 14 kilometers from the bottom to the top of the appellation we have three Winkler indexes in the scale of Winkler so we go from Winkler 3 at the top that means that temperature goes down every hundred meters you go up and from

[00:34:24] thousand meters that is like three thousand feet elevation to fifteen to sixteen hundred meters that today there's a number of different grape varieties planted there in both red and white but it seems pretty strong like the wines are good from Malbec Cabernet Franc and to some extent

[00:34:54] Syrah right yeah I believe that what Tari best performing grape varieties are outstanding Chardonnay in the in the Appellation something else that happened during the Donna Paula era is that you worked

[00:35:24] with a number of analogists that then went on to very successful careers so you met David Bonomi even back at Gantia when eventually he worked at Norton and then you hired a young Matteus Michelini who's now considered one of the more experimental and interesting producers and maybe all of Argentina he was one of the first to do an orange wine but he also is one of the people who's emphasized freshness in his own wines

[00:35:53] and he's done a lot of work with vineyard work and organic farming and then his brother after Matteus left his brother Wampi also worked at Donna Paula so now he is another person that's really associated with really fresh tasting wines at Altruco and other places that he's worked yes I met David Bonomi in 1995 so I met him in Gancia and in my time of Dona Paula I had

[00:36:23] to hire a winemaker to join me and in 1999 I met Mattias Michelini and I have great memories of working with him he was he is a very talented winemaker he is a passionate guy working with Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay and he's very sensitive and we used to work together in both sides in the vineyards and the

[00:36:53] winery and I learned a lot from him likewise I taught him about vineyards so Mattias left Doña Paula and Juan P Michelini his brother took his place and so from the same school the same family we used to work together until I crossed paths again with David Bonomi that started working with me at Doña Paula in 2005

[00:37:22] just to circle back for a second Mattias Michelini who's now you know somewhat of a well established figure in Argentina known for pushing boundaries one of the things that he was doing especially for white wine was he was picking significantly earlier at Dona Paula than was the normal routine for Argentina and one of the things we've seen throughout Mateus Michelini's career is that he's not afraid of his peers think he's pushing an envelope too much if he's doing something different that's fine with him

[00:37:52] and so one of the things that he was doing different at that time was he was picking significantly earlier it was a radical way definitely I remember in late 90s and even all the way Matias was a radical winemaker harvesting early he used

[00:38:21] to harvest when nobody considered to pick especially white varieties and yes he was called the green winemaker because the way he used to harvest and he did a completely different style of wine such a very remarkable character I remember making a chardonnay with him

[00:38:51] at Doña Paula that he presented in a contest and he was dequalified because the jury thought that it wasn't chardonnay they thought it was another thing and he was dequalified because it was a chardonnay contest and you can imagine his reaction after that so that is a picture that characterized the moment in Argentina what was it like commercially trying to sell the wines that he was making at Doña Paula

[00:39:22] in the market you know you always have people that really like the ones you do or hate the ones you do so Swamilis love the wines he does really like the freshness the purity of the character many times the radical expression of the wines but some people that like more bold mature lower acidity wines they don't like so it's very challenging but he's convinced

[00:39:52] of the way he has been doing I think he has not changed the style so Wampi who took over as a knowlogist at Dona Paula when you were still there and you hired him after Mateus left he's also known for really fresh tasting wines today probably some of the freshest tasting wines in all of Argentina maybe maybe maybe well he followed Mateus school I mean

[00:40:21] convinced about the freshness of the wines and the quality of the white wines made and harvested in an early stage he's still making and keeping that kind of family style after leaving Dona Paula and then going through Sorzal he's now making fantastic fresh wines and Altaruco in Gueltagheri what happened was you know a project that you had been at from the

[00:40:51] beginning Dona Paula became you know a big operation over the course of the time that you worked there and you were thinking about maybe doing something a little smaller I mean a lot smaller a more boutique but the understanding was that they weren't going and so then you made a transition yeah I remember I was trying to make something that I can enjoy by myself like a very small scale production

[00:41:20] wine I was just thinking about few barrels so I wanted to do it when I was at Doña Paula but I was not allowed to make it there so well convinced by my instinct I started thinking about making something quite different to the wines that we were doing in Doña Paula at that commercial scale so I

[00:41:51] started thinking about how to pick grapes and where to make wine and that was my next step I met Susana Balbo many years ago and in that kind of transition she offered me a job at her winery and she was very generous she left me a little room where to put my barrels and where to put my little press and things and that's the way I started

[00:42:20] with David Bonomi making the wines for Per se and so it worked out because Susana Balbo who had previously worked at Katena but then had really become famous for Tarantes and Krios was a very famous label but then her children were coming involved with the company and she felt that you could be kind of a buffer between the generations or someone that both sides could talk to or someone that could mentor or have

[00:42:50] also a different vision of different places I believe there was a situation where her Tarantes growers in Salta decided not to sell their grapes anymore and so she needed to plant her own Tarantes grapes to continue with Krios and so you probably had some knowledge about how to plant vineyards and so it was a situation where you wanted some freedom to do something under your label with some people that you knew already from

[00:43:21] Santa Bobo yes the new generation was coming to the winery I mean Ana and Jose Susana children started working with her and I was like as you say a buffer Susana needed somebody to help her in the vineyard development and in the understanding of places she used to make Tarantes coming from Salta

[00:43:52] but she was convinced that the Torrontes should work even better in Duco Valley so she brought some cuttings from a very well known vineyard in Salta to bring the cuttings to Mendoza to plant a vineyard in Altamira so she planted a vineyard 7 hectares in Altamira where the grapes for the main Torrontes we make at the winery Susana Valvo are and Susana

[00:44:22] is a strong personality she is well known for making with Torrontes something very different compared with what everybody knows about Torrontes you know from that kind of rustic gray variety variety Susana has converted the Torrontes in a fine wine because of her mastery with the press and the way of winemaking Torrontes

[00:44:51] is very singular in Argentina there's been an evolution in the last say 10 years at her winery where the wines you know taste different today than they did in the past and in an earlier period was a little bit bigger on the palate and a little bit broader a little lusher deeper more in keeping with the time like at the market but if you try that wine now which is from different vineyards it's leaner it's more mineral

[00:45:21] it's fresher and so that had to be an evolution too and then there's been some evolution on the reds it was ripe very ripe it was very perfumey something fleshy heavy now it's a completely different animal torontes

[00:45:51] from the high altitude altamira vineyards is like another grape varietal you taste the torontes it's really fresh more mineral citrusy less obvious fruit but much more intensity and freshness that it used to be if I were to just speak very briefly about New York or the market that I see I think that's the part that people haven't really caught up with is the fact that most of the people we've talked about in this

[00:46:20] conversation who make or market wine the wines today are quite a bit fresher than they would have been in the late 90s are the whole country there is that can still find big lush deep especially reds sometimes from foreign enologists that's certainly there but I think what

[00:46:50] often I don't hear about much in and reds and there are a bunch of winemakers that really started this process in probably probably the turning point was in between 2012 and 14 vintages

[00:47:20] so the way that we know Malbec today is different and is mostly based in two main factors one is the sights where the Malbec comes from and the other is the winemaking has changed completely so I think the turning point was those years and that's funny that that would be those years because that's when you started

[00:47:50] Per Se right which is your own boutique project like that lines up perfectly with the next segment of your career right yeah yeah yeah well Per Se means for itself so our plan with David was to make a wine that reflects the place rather than winemaking and technology or even ourselves reflects more the landscape the high Uco Valley with that

[00:48:20] kind of climate influence with this type of very special hard soils and we wanted to do a different wine in comparison with the wines we used to do in our previous wineries that's why we started in the harvest of 2012 where we made our first few barrels of La Crea and Jubileus and with the

[00:48:49] focus oriented in making wine that were very representative of the place the first wines were coming from Hualtaheri from a vineyard planted in 1400 meters above sea level in very calcareous soils that was a very special place to that is not the representation of Malbec that we

[00:49:20] know but it's more about the picture of Hualtaheri rather than the Malbec what happened was you're making the wine at Susana Balbo in that facility and then you're purchasing grapes but then you went to a monastery visit that was based around where your children went to school and an invitation from the monks yeah my children went to an school that on a Saturday journey they

[00:49:50] invited us to go to a kind of spiritual retreat being held by the monks so I remember going on a Saturday and listening the monks speaking the Lectio Divina and in one of to think about what they said and I remember walking around the vineyards that they

[00:50:19] planted in the monastery and I was kind of blown away when I walking that was because of the stony calcareous soil and after

[00:50:49] coming back and going to see the monk to ask you know you should plant the vineyard here in the hills and I say well I don't think nothing is going to grow there because it's a very harsh soil it's very difficult windy sunny okay if you give me your permission I well after a week the monks

[00:51:19] thought about my proposal and I came back and I offered them okay again would you like to plant the vineyard and they said yes so I didn't lose any time and change completely the way of working in viticulter because it was a totally different condition so a lot of

[00:51:49] times in guatulere as you had referred to people were planting like riverbeds the area itself is very high elevation but they were planting a little lower and then you found this hill that also seemed to have calcar calcarous soil and this was interesting to you and when we say monastery this particular monastery is 40 years old and they are still building it inside the building today and there

[00:52:18] is this sense that the property is being developed and so they are probably open to someone coming up and saying well I river beds and creeks and I planted in such an even topography so

[00:52:48] I had to make a shift in my mind in the way to plant in those different conditions from very deep clay and sometimes gravelly soils to such sandy and stony and in a very high calcareous content soil but there was another change when I went to the hills because things changed again a lot a very uneven topography with a very

[00:53:18] high slope so my mind changed a lot the way I needed to work that's to plant in goblet head trained head trained and the first goblets that I planted they were like free bush vines without any but then with the time and looking at the climate adversities that I had to face I decided to put on a stake so

[00:53:48] the goblets were converted in a kind of echalas or in a kind of plants with tutor as I call in Spanish we call the stake the tutor the guide so it's a very simple viticulture it's more about observation rather than intervention what Eddie is describing is a shift in approach as he planted a hillside vineyard with slopes which was uncommon at that time in Argentina

[00:54:18] the adoption of individual vines on stakes would be akin to what you would find in the of this program each vines has got a stake traditionally and it's not for pruning it's not pruning on cordon de Roya or guillo it's pruning on

[00:54:48] gobelet not exactly like in Beaujolais but a small gobelet because in the slopes it's much more easier to work with stake but it needs a lot of time to tying up the vines and even to prune but it's much easier to work jean gonin reappears later in this episode and you can hear about eddie's encounter with jean after this short break

[00:55:18] the last big event of the year is coming up on november 16th in new york city and you can join me for it i'll be opening up absolutely legendary wines like 1989 obrion 90 la mission 82 de crew and 90 mon rose and there will be appearances as well from chateau margot chateau latour cheval blanc and several more top estates the wines will be complimented by a four course menu in a private room of

[00:55:47] manhattan's union square cafe go to all drink to that pod dot com and click on the wine dinners tab for the details that's i-l-l-drink to that p-o-d dot com then select the wine dinners tab to see the complete list of wines for the evening and to purchase seats to attend on november 16th i look forward to opening stunning bottles of wine enjoying them with an excellent menu and sharing that all with you

[00:56:35] the monastery of raquis is nearby here so there's some now acclaim for this particular zone that you kind of originally encountered just taking a walk on a break from a monastery visit and one of the things that drew you to it was the white stones right yeah the white stone the color of the soil the kind of bushes growing there the strong sunlight and so

[00:57:04] I found myself doing a iticulture like in another part of the world it wasn't Mendoza it wasn't so I passed the reaper breaking up the soil trying to create fractures for the vines to help them to go down with the roots so it was a very challenging and also demanding kind of work in the soil preparation to establish the

[00:57:34] first vineyards in that condition but I mean they picked the right guy for the job right like you've had some other experience planting vineyards although you had to break a few tools to get this one in the

[00:58:37] under the shade of the forest. That is a very particular parcel. It's a very small parcel. It's 0.3 hectares where we start making our first chardonnay. There's a lot going on because each parcel is planted differently, but some things that you do that are maybe unusual would be the planting on stakes and very close spacing. Earlier at the beginning of this interview, you talked about how at Gantia the row spacing was quite wide

[00:59:06] apart from each other, and you've done the opposite at the top of this hill. Then another is plowing. You just don't do it much, and then also spraying, which you don't do much, and then green harvesting, which you don't do much. I feel like you have come to these conclusions based on working other vineyards for a long time. I came to those conclusions because I've learned that the most transformative change in our viticulture

[00:59:34] was to go from something very technical to something more artisanal. Technical means 30 years ago, we thought about making wine independently of the site in a very technical way. To make a good wine, you need to have or you need to grow a textbook vineyard, a very well-made and planted and trained vineyard.

[01:00:01] instead of thinking about the place, thinking about the site. This is the main transformation. And when you are based in a completely different site where soil and climatic conditions are different, you need to think about how to play with them. And the conditions that I found in Hualtari and precisely in the monasterio

[01:00:27] allowed me to plant in such a rough condition and topography a vineyard that has been transformative. I believe that now I see people following the trend and there are more hills in Hualtari planted. The monastery hills is the last kind of finger of the Lomas de Hualtari. But there are developments in the other and in a similar way,

[01:00:54] trained by stakes or bush vines being planted. It's a lower yield vineyard. They are not really commercial kind of vineyards. So you need to understand what you are doing. Some people ask me if I can go and help them to develop a bush vine vineyard. And I say, you don't need it because your soil conditions are completely different. So you need to think about

[01:01:23] where are you going with the wines you need to make. And well, there in the monastery, we found something really foundational to think about the new way to make wines. What are the takeaways there? Why would you specifically use closer spacing? Why would you not plow for five years on the slopes? Why would you avoid spraying? Why narrow spacing?

[01:01:52] It's because the poverty of the soil. We have soils that, in times where we speak about regenerative viticulture, we even go beyond that concept because we don't have soil. So we have to generate the soil. We have to build the soil. We have a very shallow topsoil. Sometimes it's 20 centimeters, 30, 40. So we need to build the soil. And to build the soil,

[01:02:20] you need to add organic matter. We do it under the form of compost. We try to do every year or every second year, apply our own compost in a way of three pounds of compost per plant to increase the organic matter at least by 0.1% annually. So that means that in 10 years,

[01:02:46] we can have something in a more appropriate way to grow vines. And the narrow spacing is because of that poverty. We have a lot of competition among the vines, so we need to help them to create a nice resosfera with the microbials and the microorganisms, fungi, bacterias in the soil due to the use of the compost.

[01:03:15] And in that kind of environment, hard soils, difficult climate, difficult weather, you need to create a completely different system. And a bush vine is a small plant, a small plant with a small yield, a low yield. And the low yield is about two to three tons per hectare that you need to keep. And what about the spraying? Well, what I've learned is

[01:03:45] when you have such challenging conditions, talking about weather, I mean a lot of wind, a lot of sunlight exposure, and this kind of job where the vines become more resilient, you don't need to spray anything. This is something that I learned after 30 years of spraying in a preventive way. We used to spray vines

[01:04:11] even before seeing any symptom of disease like powdery or downy mildew. And I realized that observing, looking at the vines and looking that they don't have any symptoms, I say, why to spray? I don't need to spray nothing. So from 2020 onwards, I haven't sprayed nothing in the vineyards and I can see a very healthy

[01:04:38] and natural vineyard growing. And you typically avoid plowing the slopes. And I believe that's because you don't want erosion. But are there other benefits that come from not plowing? You mentioned regenerative viticulture before. Yeah. Since the very beginning when we plant the vineyard, I don't like plowing the vineyard because you turn the soil over. And this is something that I don't want to do. Instead of that, we do a reaping,

[01:05:09] going down and just cutting the soil to break it. After that, and after planting the vineyard, I like to keep and to preserve the natural vegetation because we have a lot of wind erosion. So the idea of keeping the natural endemic plants is to keep that topsoil and the healthy soil. It's so shallow, the soil, that I need to preserve at least the topsoil.

[01:05:37] That's why I don't plow and I prefer to cut the grass and to sometimes to pass a very little kind of manual tillage to work the soil. Something else you did that's maybe a little more unusual is that you took some old vines of Malbec and then you replanted them into a different site. Yes, there was a decision that I took after being asked if I know somebody

[01:06:06] to help people to pull a vineyard out because they were established in a neighborhood. They need to build houses where Malbec, old Malbec vineyard was planted. So they asked me about helping them and I say, yeah, if you give me the vines because I went to the vineyards and I saw the vines, they were so healthy. The vineyard was planted in 1940 so I decided to take some of them

[01:06:35] and to plant in the monastery. That was not a real planting, it was a transplanting. So I came with the vines in a couple of tracts and I had to make a trench because you can imagine the root system of those vines was quite big. and I did a trench, I put a lot of compost together with mycorrhiza and ventonite

[01:07:01] and planted those 80 years old plants and they went there really well. There is a new parcel called Las Ancianas that is about plants born in 1940s. When you move old vines from one side to another like that, what happens? What is the quality of the fruit? How does the vine behave? That is very curious

[01:07:30] and I like the question because the first, the first couple of years we didn't have much grapes to harvest so we harvest a little bit and they would make a kind of demigone of wine and the wine tastes like a Malbec from Lujan de Cuso. So it's like the wine having a memory in the wine that we were making

[01:07:58] but after a few years now we are in the third, fourth vintage the grape and the wines started changing so now it seems more well terry than in the first couple of vintages. This is something curious but I've seen and I'm amazed of that. And you sourced some Syrah as well for the property. Yeah. I really enjoy most finding people that

[01:08:27] two of my thinking alike in two different places and I met Jan Gonon in the northern Rhone so we became kind of friends and one opportunity I visited the vineyard of Raimont Royat and I asked Jan to take some cutting from Raimont vineyard so I took a few cuttings and I grafted in the vineyard and so we have a Syrah it's a son

[01:08:56] of the Raimont Royat Syrah that is planted in a few rows of the monastery so we are making a wine with that Syrah that it seems very interesting. So the year that I visited there had been frost before I got there but it seemed like the yields of those plants were very small. Yeah, yeah, you know a common Syrah clone yields like 350, 300 grams per bunch they're pretty big

[01:09:26] and with big berries as well. So the first couple of bunches that we had from that Syrah were very small so the yield is small as well. So I think it's not a clone it's a muscle selection of Syrah and it's a completely different material I'm sure it's going to be a completely different quality at the time to make a wine. Yeah, that's one of the things I like about the Northern Rhone. You can really see the difference between the Massol

[01:09:56] and the clonal stuff and usually they're not very happy with the clonal stuff. It happened the same to us. I remember working with clonal selection more in the 90s and the early 2000s and we learned a lot from clonal selection and there are certainly some varieties that play well, do well with clonal selection but you can see the example of Malbec. Malbec is a grape that we even introduced some

[01:10:25] clones from south of France. We call it Cot instead of Malbec and they don't work as good as Malbec. The pre-phylaxeric selection of Malbec we have in Mendoza with such a huge amount of individuals and the diversity place in a completely different way and we can make very good wine independently of the place when you compare

[01:10:55] with the clonal selection. So I think beyond Malbec other varieties in the clonal selection has worked well but in Malbec we prefer the pre-phylaxeric Malbec. And in white you have something that's referred to as Mendoza Chardonnay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I was at Gansia we found a few blocks planted with Mendoza Chardonnay. It's a material that came to

[01:11:24] Mendoza from Dijon before clonal selection. So Dijon is one of the places where clonal selection has been made but I think it's from the early 60s and that muscle selection of called Mendoza came from Dijon in the late 50s. It was brought by a university professor that was in Dijon doing a scholarship. She came back to Mendoza and she planted

[01:11:54] the Chardonnay Mendoza in a research center where it was the provider of the material for the rest of the vineyards in Mendoza. So I found it in Gansia that they brought the material in the mid 60s early 70s and it was something very singular very particular with small bunches hen and chicken

[01:12:23] nobody wanted to have the Mendoza clone because it's a very low yielding clone so the producers didn't want to use it because the aim of the times was to produce grapes instead of make wine but we really liked a lot we really liked the wines we used to make with Matias and I took some cuttings and I been using the same material almost in every vineyard that I go but one day

[01:12:54] David asked me for some cuttings of Malbec to be planted in his own vineyard so I said yes you can go and take the cutting so when you take cuttings before being planted you have to bury them in the soil that is a way to keep the cuttings fresh until the time you need to plant so David asked my vineyard manager can you give me some Malbec

[01:13:23] cutting so they started putting out the cutting from the soil and by accident they took some Chardonnay cuttings that were pretty close to the Malbec cuttings when David planted the Malbec vineyard it was intermingled with Chardonnay so he had a kind of Malbec Chardonnay co-planting so he didn't want to lose the Chardonnay grapes and he started making a very particular

[01:13:53] kind of Chardonnay that was the first floor aged Chardonnay made by David in the early 2000s there's actually a lot of dry table wine Chardonnay in Argentina now that is aged under floor and it has a sort of salinity often a kind of character that someone who liked white burgundy grown on limestone would probably be drawn to

[01:14:23] there's a character to it of freshness and lift from this floor aging and it's not sherry so it's not fortified it's table wine and it tends to read pretty favorably from people who you know enjoy a white burgundy like a Polini Moroche that kind of thing but it it's a part of it is the material but then a part of it is the technique and

[01:14:59] accident it it was an accident one day he called me Eddie would like to taste the wine that I'm making and a floor veil has been made and I said yes and the time that I tried first it was a 16 years old Chardonnay in barras so he took a sample from the bar and I tried and I was amazed I was completely amazed by the

[01:15:29] quality he asked me do we have to put in bottle I say of course it's a expression that is based on not exactly fruit they are not fruit wines they are wines that shows more like almonds like yeasty character

[01:15:59] in the nose and beautiful fresh sensation together with some salty notes in a wide ample mouth field this is something that is not they don't taste like sherry they don't taste like jura they're like kind of mendoza way for me the kind of knock on argentina is that a lot of this is irrigated and you know typically I prefer non-irrigated because especially with a terroir like

[01:16:28] limestone or granite I feel like if it's not irrigated I get more of that in the glass now I

[01:17:12] tried examples of whites but mostly chardonnay harvested earlier made with high acidity content lower alcohol and trying to go far beyond from the fruit trying to escape from the fruit and

[01:17:43] coming from the upper Uco Valley mostly that you can find nowadays so we focus there on white but really most of your production is in red and there's a lot of Malbec I mean a lot it's a small property but there's predominantly Malbec and then sometimes it's blended with Cabernet Franc like in the Lecrae bottling and then you have the Syrah so the Lecrae is like one of my favorite wines from Argentina it's quite good and I would kind of make an analogy to

[01:18:13] like Ozone you know if you were to think of Ozone as half Merlot half Cabernet Franc I feel like in the Lecrae example the Merlot character is played by Malbec a lot of times you're dealing with whole berries right because Malbec has those thicker skins and even when you de-stem it which you do a lot of times still the berries are whole when you ferment them

[01:18:57] times like for example in 2020 or 23 that were warm vintages the Cabernet Franc gives to the Malbec the energy the tension the electricity that Malbec couldn't have for itself in certain occasions so we really like making this kind of blend and Cabernet Franc being a great performer variety in Huelta I think it doesn't have a big window where it can perform well but in

[01:19:27] Huelta it plays fantastically well it's a great complement for Malbec so what we do is a traditional classic when making harvest them together because the Malbec for Lacree is planted in south facing the Cabernet Franc is planted in the plateau and north facing though we can harvest them together we can go to the winery distem them put in the same vat and ferment them together

[01:19:57] that is different to a blend it's not the same when you co-ferment them and you blend them you will have two different results and we like the way they play together and we do a very soft extraction because fermenting in such small vats we can

[01:20:36] for at least a year so the final result is a wine full of energy with an expression beyond the fruit again it's like again floral notes and chalkiness and earthiness and we really like very much the lifted and fine expression of that co-fermentation so something you like to talk about is a verticality of a wine yeah

[01:21:05] I love talking about verticality or lineal kind of wine that is a wine that is austere the representation in your mouth is a kind of straight line going back to the end of your palate nothing like the common malbec that is wider ample in your mouth this goes straight to the back of your palate for me it's a really interesting wine because it's sort of unlike the past and sort of unlike

[01:21:35] the contemporaries and what I mean do there is oak sometimes but it's older oak so

[01:22:05] in Argentina it's not uncommon for someone to do concrete the whole way through that's actually pretty normal for Malbec and you do that with some wines but with this wine that I particularly like it does see some older wood and the thing about it is you know David who makes wine with you he worked at Norton and when I think of Norton I think of a bigger expression less refined than what you're doing now but a darker tone of

[01:22:34] fruit and that's also true of this wine like this is not a lightweight wine I would make the analogy again to ozone like it has fruit right like you guys might not want to over extract it but there's some level of extraction but at the same time as it has that austerity it's not rustic right like it doesn't have whole cluster characters it doesn't have like hard tannins it has more austerity in terms of drive like you said linearity

[01:23:04] so that's what makes it seems to me from your example to be pretty successful but they seem to not like that side of it and sometimes I wonder if

[01:23:51] expression among the wines that we make I mean whereas we make you below from the north facing slope that it tastes like a Malbec but a Malbec from the monastery that is showing the generous expression of the Malbec and having that kind of nice fluidity but without losing the weight of a Malbec not as a heavy weight just

[01:24:21] something right in the middle of being a classic Malbec and something very fluid this is something right in the middle that it tastes like a Malbec we can say well this is a good representation of a Malbec from Monasterio or Guatayari but Unida el Bonzan doesn't taste like Malbec I the main answer will be because

[01:24:50] it's planted in a place where Malbec doesn't play the same role than other places so the east facing slope it doesn't see any sun from the afternoon so it's only the morning sun so the physiology of the vine growing just looking to the east is completely different so it's a very heavy stony calcareous soil the vines are almost planted over the bedrock

[01:25:20] so we harvest the grapes and it's the first parcel that we harvest every harvest and in the winery we feel we are playing with a completely different grape rather than Malbec so the extraction is different the color of the juice is different the final wine tastes different it's much fresher and it's in terms of austerity is the

[01:25:50] most austere of the three wines I think that's the one that if I were into like a cornas like if that was my thing then I would enjoy that wine from you which I think a lot of

[01:26:45] fresh sand and and and lacres this kind of tannins are very particular in in the proximity of domas del jaboncillo or lomas de gualtairi when you go to the more sandy soils and the more riverbed soils those tannins changed and also the fruit expression in the smelling change so you go from more kind of black fruit red fruit from the valley floor to the

[01:27:14] earthiness and chalkiness and mineral expression in the nose when you go close to lomas de gualtairi it's oversimplification but I think there's some truth to it to say that Argentina went through a period of massive investment from foreign wine companies and foreign consultant interest and they were making wines with the intention to have a character that was more varietal

[01:27:44] or more similar to some models that you would find in other parts of the world they were coming from other parts of in parts of the world and one of the things that happened is that a number of Argentinians were hired by

[01:28:14] these companies over time and now have their own projects and that's partly because Argentina the investment there was rapid and it happened really fast and so someone like yourself is still relatively young and you have your own project now and that's not just you and so Mateus Michelini like we talked about Wampi like we talked about there's others and they worked for international companies and sometimes with international consultants

[01:28:44] Mateus Michelini worked next to Michel Roland and it's really hard to picture two people who've made wines that are more dissimilar than those two people but one of the things that you can't miss now when you go to Argentina is that those region the terroir and trying to say like okay

[01:29:13] we are from here and so is this wine this wine is from here this specific place as opposed to saying like no this is a generic Malbec or a varietal Chardonnay or something that is going to be offered for cheaper as an alternative to the benchmark somewhere else does that make sense absolutely absolutely what you have mentioned is I think it's the biggest shift Argentinian wine has in the last two

[01:29:43] decades considering the kind of viticultural and winemaking that we used to do in the 90s and early 2000 in comparison with what we are doing today is very relevant for the future of Argentine wine the wines we used to make were varietal Malbec planted wherever they can come from and they have to taste like Malbec very well made very well polished more technical

[01:30:13] but nowadays the wines can be non-perfect wines but they taste as they had to taste the real meaning of those wines is they are made under the conditions of being grown and harvested in that particular place and they had to taste like the place is so there is a hinge in between two generations where

[01:30:43] people around their 50s and maybe 60s together with people from 40 to 30 are changing things in Argentina towards making wines with a real sense of place and now you those places considering a generational change your son works with you at the winery and he's 29 right

[01:31:12] yeah we are very lucky because we believe that wine is something that has to be multi generational you have to pass the torch for the next one and it needs to happen naturally organically not being forced by so with David we have been lucky enough to have our children really interested is

[01:31:42] the future of Argentine wine is based on those kind of generation it's not only related to us but also to other winemakers I've seen many friends being succeeded by their children from this perspective New York I think a lot of times people think Argentinian wine sort of tastes the same year to year those vintage characters are the same but that's not what I've experienced tasting your

[01:32:12] wines per se 24 tastes very different than 25 to me but I think it's beyond that and there does seem to be a difference between colder vintages and warmer vintages and frost so how would you sum up what you've seen so far working with the monastery if if you go back to the past and if you were in a conversation

[01:32:42] among winemakers you will have seen that that conversation drove to the way to see you know we there is a uniformity among vintages I mean there is a kind of consistency almost all the vintages look alike in terms of tasting the wines were pretty similar this is what we thought a few decades ago but in the way that we started

[01:33:11] understanding our places we realized that we also understood the vintage variation we have so it's not just because of the technique or because you can make a wine in a different facility it goes far beyond that we have learned from vintages the cold vintages give us a completely different type of wine when we compare

[01:33:40] with warm vintages if you ask me at Perse we've learned that cold vintages if they're cold and dry are among our favorites because you have the flexibility to have an extended window to harvest the grapes and you have good enough time to try to experiment and to decide what is the most meaningful aspect of the final wine that is

[01:34:10] the date of harvest when you decide when to harvest and you are precise you're going to get very good results and in a cold and dry vintages you have the flexibility that allows you to take better decisions and one of the best vintages in the last two three decades was 2019 2019 was cold and dry and we enjoyed a lot that vintage but then it's followed by cold and wet

[01:34:40] cold and wet could be complicated in the valley floor when you have deeper soil when you have more clay you can have some problems but up in the hills you don't see any problem because the soils have a beautiful drainage so you can have rain and you can go and harvest the grapes in a couple of hours so this is not a problem and the wines coming from cold and wet vintages

[01:35:09] in places like Gualtayari and El Monasterio are beautiful as well and why I emphasize cold because cold gives a very delicate expression if you look for finesse in your wines I think the wines coming from cold vintages are really fine expression then you have the warm vintages and you

[01:35:39] find warm and humid it's usually warm and dry because of the continentality of our climate so warm and dry means two things depending on the crop level or the amount of grapes you have to harvest for example if it's warm and the yield was

[01:36:09] small so we needed to go fast and harvest in a very short window and that probably is the worst among the different vintages so there is a vintage variation we can have frost and we can have sunda we can have hail and one year like 26 we we have frost and the production of wine came

[01:36:39] so it's going to be like 8000 10,000 bottles for 26 hard years to go on but we have to go ahead as a young man Eddie De Popolo liked to go out into the vineyards with his family and he now as an older man has a son who likes to do the same thank you very much for being here today thank you Levi Eddie De Popolo is

[01:37:09] for Susanna Balbo in Mendoza in Argentina All Drink To That is hosted and produced by myself Levi Dalton editorial assistance has been provided by Bill Kimsey the show music was performed and composed by Rob Moose and Thomas Bartlett show artwork by Alicia Tanoian Aaron Scala contributed original pieces the show website is all drink to that pod dot com that's I L drink to that pod dot com

[01:37:39] which is where to see the schedule of upcoming in person wine events or to make one of the crucially important donations that help power the program you can donate from anywhere via paypal at the show website to reach Levi about consulting speaking or tasting opportunities please email levi opens wine at gmail dot com that's L E V I opens with an S wine at gmail dot com remember to hit

[01:38:09] subscribe or to that way you'll see every episode and thank you for listening while preparing for this episode I read a 2019 interview with Eddie Del Popolo

[01:38:39] published on vinfolio dot com and I also listened to an interview with Eddie on the cork talk podcast I mean something that cannot hurt is the fact that people in Buenos Aires which is a major population center they drink Argentinian wine partly because import controls but there's a local market for the wine that seems interested in the wine local market for domestic wine has

[01:39:09] been always huge but quite recently probably the last two three years Argentina is being more open for foreign wines so there are wines that are coming into the country coming mostly from Europe and there is a strong curiosity among the especially among the sommelier communities to bring those wines to the country and if you go to the

[01:39:39] main restaurants in Buenos Aires and you give a look to the wine list you will find some even though the consumption of local wine is huge it's the most important thing though