Three hundred and twelve vines, and the first 100 points Argentina ever took.

In May 2021 the British critic Tim Atkin published his annual Argentina report and did something he had never done for a wine from anywhere in South America: he gave one a perfect score. The wine was the 2019 Uni del Bonnesant, made by winemaker David Bonomi and agronomist Edgardo del Pópolo from a single parcel in Gualtallary, in Mendoza's Uco Valley. That same report rated 1,176 Argentine wines at 90 points or higher. Only one reached 100.

Five years later Atkin did it again, for a different vintage of the same wine, and named it his red wine of the year a second time. Nothing else in this cellar's Argentine corner built a reputation that fast. Weinert and Felipe Rutini are names earned across a century. Uni del Bonnesant did it in two harvests.

A parcel, not an estate

Per Se is not a winery in the sense that Weinert or Felipe Rutini are. It farms one 2.2-hectare block in Monasterio, a sub-zone of Gualtallary at the northwestern edge of the Uco Valley, at close to 1,500 metres. The block is split into three parcels on highly calcareous soil, and the smallest of the three holds 312 Malbec vines and fills a single barrel. That parcel, farmed and vinified apart from everything else Per Se makes, is Uni del Bonnesant.

The altitude is the same argument made a few kilometres away at the Adrianna Vineyard, also in Gualtallary: cold nights at elevation hold the acidity that lets a Malbec age, which the valley floor cannot offer at any price. What Per Se does differently is scale. Adrianna is a named grand cru inside a large estate. Uni del Bonnesant is a barrel from vines that would be a rounding error anywhere else in Mendoza. Most Malbec blocks in the valley below are measured in hectares. This one is measured in vines, farmed like a single row rather than a vineyard.

Two 100s, five vintages apart

The 2019 was the vintage that made the point first: 100 points in Tim Atkin's Argentina 2021 Special Report, the first time he had awarded that score to a South American wine, and his red wine of the year. The 2019 is in this cellar.

The 2024, bottled as Uni del Bonnesant Monte Alabanza, repeated it in Atkin's 2026 report: another 100, another red wine of the year, from a parcel that had by then had five more harvests to prove the first result was not a one-off. That bottle is here too. Atkin has since named Bonomi his winemaker of the year, a separate honour for the same small body of work.

Production moves with the vintage rather than with demand, because there is no demand side to adjust for: the 2019 made 240 bottles, the 2022 made 166, both entirely from the same 312 vines. There is no larger bottling to fall back on in a short year.

What is constant between the two rows is the parcel: the same 312 vines, five vintages apart, farmed the same way each time rather than expanded to meet the attention the first score brought.

Where it sits against the rest of the cellar

The note on this cellar's old Argentine bottles makes the opposite argument: that Mendoza's history was lost because nobody in the twentieth century expected it to be worth keeping. Uni del Bonnesant is the same region proving the opposite, in real time, to a critic with no reason to be generous.

It sits closest in style and intent to Cobos and Chacra, the other two wines here built on a single high-altitude site rather than a blended range. All three are modern, precise, and designed to be judged on one parcel's result rather than on a house style built over generations — which is exactly what Weinert and Felipe Rutini were never trying to do.

What a Swiss buyer should actually weigh

A wine with two harvests of scored track record carries a different kind of risk from a wine with fifty. There is no auction history to check it against and no decade of back vintages to show how it ages, a gap addressed at length in the note on buying rare wine without getting burned. What exists instead is a transparent, tiny production number, a named winemaker and agronomist, and a score that was awarded once and then repeated under scrutiny rather than awarded once and left unchallenged.

For a collection held partly as a Swiss asset, that is a different kind of position than a 1961 Bordeaux: smaller, newer, and priced on a story still being written rather than one closed decades ago. A bottle with no comparable is the right frame either way, a 1946 Pétrus or a 2024 Uni del Bonnesant, for the same reason: there is nothing else to measure it against.

What we do

We hold both scored vintages, 2019 and 2024, with condition recorded in writing on arrival, the same as every other bottle in the cellar. We do not publish prices. If the Uni del Bonnesant interests you, write, and the answer will describe what is actually in the bottle: the vintage, the fill level and the paperwork, not a number pulled from an auction house that has never once seen one change hands.