The Argentine bottles nobody kept.
Europe kept its old bottles because it knew they were worth keeping. Argentina drank hers.
There is a straightforward reason old Argentine wine is scarce, and it has nothing to do with quality. Until the 1990s, Mendoza made wine overwhelmingly for the domestic market, in a country with high inflation, closed borders and a drinking culture that did not lay bottles down. The wine was made, sold and drunk. Nobody was building a library because there was no market that would ever ask for one.
The consequence is that a vertical of a great Argentine wine is harder to assemble than a vertical of a great Bordeaux, despite being a fraction of the price. Bordeaux was saved by people who expected it to be valuable. Mendoza was not.
What decides a Mendoza vintage
Nothing that appears on a European vintage chart.
The Pacific oscillation. El Niño years bring rain and disease pressure to Mendoza; La Niña years bring drought. The distinction explains most of the variation between one harvest and the next, and it operates on a completely different cycle from the Atlantic weather that decides Bordeaux.
Hail. A summer storm can remove a single vineyard in twenty minutes while the property next door ripens normally. Netting is now common and was not always.
Altitude. The vineyards run from roughly 900 to over 1,500 metres. The latitude alone would give flabby, low-acid wine; the altitude, and the cold nights that come with it, is what makes Mendoza able to age at all.
Catena Zapata Estiba Reservada, 1990 to 2018
The wine that proved the point. The complete run is here, one bottle of every vintage produced, twenty-eight bottles, beginning with the first vintage in 1990.
Two years are missing, and both absences are the record of a season rather than a gap in the collection: 1998, an El Niño year, and 2012, a frost year. The wine was not made.
The early bottles are the difficult ones. In 1990 Argentina exported almost nothing, and the idea that a Mendoza red would still be interesting thirty-five years later was unproven. The bottles that exist exist because somebody in Mendoza decided to keep them.
Felipe Rutini, 1993 to 2012
Nineteen bottles, one of each vintage, from the top cuvée of Bodega La Rural, which was founded in 1885 and is among the oldest working wineries in Mendoza.
Outside Argentina these bottles are effectively never seen, let alone in sequence. This is the part of the cellar that a Swiss collector is least likely to have encountered and most likely to find interesting, because there is no reference price and no auction record to argue with. It is bought on the story and on the tasting, which is how wine used to be bought.
Weinert, and the rest
Weinert Malbec Estrella belongs to a specific Argentine tradition: wines held in large old oak for many years before release, made by a house that ignored international fashion throughout the period when everyone else was chasing it. The style is oxidative, savoury and completely unlike modern Malbec.
Beyond these, the cellar holds Bodega López Montchenot going back decades, Cobos, Chacra from Patagonia, and the Adrianna Vineyard parcels, which are the modern end of the same argument: that Argentine altitude produces wine with the acidity to last.
For a Swiss collector this is the least crowded corner of the cellar and the one where the price bears no
relation to the scarcity. There is no index tracking a 1993 Felipe Rutini, because until now nobody could
have offered one.
Why is old Argentine wine so rare?
Until the 1990s Mendoza produced almost entirely for a domestic market in a country with high inflation and no culture of cellaring. The wine was made, sold and drunk, so very few old bottles survive at any price.
What was the first vintage of Catena Zapata Estiba Reservada?
- The complete run to 2018 is twenty-eight bottles; none was made in 1998, an El Niño year, or in 2012, a frost year.
What decides a good vintage in Mendoza?
Chiefly the Pacific oscillation, which decides whether the summer is wet or dry, and summer hail, which can remove one vineyard and leave the next untouched. Altitude provides the acidity that makes the wines age.
Can old Argentine wine actually age?
Yes. The vineyards sit between roughly 900 and 1,500 metres, and the cold nights preserve the acidity that ageing requires. The scarcity of old bottles reflects storage habits, not the capacity of the wine.