'La Vid Argentina' Series: Chasing down Melancolia

The most underrated emotion and how I went to Argentina to drown in it

Le Rosebud, Paris

This article is part of a series that will focus on my two week immersive wine trip to Argentina, exploring old and new regions, wine makers I know and new voices. Observations and feelings around Latin roots, Argentina today, its makers and its wines. Que disfruten!

One of my favorite things about traveling is that I get to put on the song ‘Love Letters’ by Ketty Lester and send a rant of texts to Felipe on how I miss him. It starts right away even before leaving, in transit to a somewhere else. I am instantly catapulted into a melancholic state (my own creation), relishing in a false ‘gone’, my mind is writing love letters. Now I am aboard a Delta flight, on my way to Buenos Aires to do a deep dive and discovery of Argentinean wine.

‘I love you’ I say to Felipe. ‘I love you more’ he replies right away. ‘No, it’s my turn. In this epoca its me more’ I say to him. This is how we timeline our relationship, by the times I love him more, and the years it reverses. The flood gates have been open, now I am swimming inside of Yusef Lateen’s Love Theme from Spartacus and in Gustavo Pena’s ‘Mandolin’. I am bouncing from note to note in Celine Dessberg’s ‘Chintamani’ and I know this Terry Callier’s album is next. Melancholy is the most underrated emotion that exists and lucky for me, I feel like I am about to land right at the center of it.

It was over a decade ago that I was in Buenos Aires. Back then I went as Felipe’s girlfriend. He was sent by his ad agency on a big production job. I took long baths in the hotel and walked around Recoleta, going into Bellas Artes, strolling down the streets of Palermo. Swiftly, I fell into a strict diet of red wine, steaks and coffee. I felt complete. Baires has an air of elegance amidst the Latin American grit. It’s got confidence and swagger, it’s irresistible. The production job was done and we flew back home to New York City. I remember I cried on the plane back, I didn’t want to let go of that place and how I felt in it. Over the years, I tried to find Buenos Aires in other places. During my wine trips to France, I pinned Paris as my Baires substitute. Since Latinos call Buenos Aires ‘the Paris of Latin America’ I was sure I’d find it there. In this process of trying to find Baires in Paris, I fell for Paris, deeply. I found a similar type of melancholy there, and the piercing kind of longing when I left it. The type of place that looks beautiful black and white, the one you dress for. It is no wonder that cafe chairs face the street - Facing the city becomes the ultimate plea to hold on to that moment, to not let it slip from your fingers, though it already has.

Soon Paris became my melancholic hub and Argentina was abandoned from my mind. That is until recently and all because of a particular wine that jammed Argentina back into my mind. It was Juanfa’s Finca Suarez, Chardonnay. A few months back, Juanfa, the man at the helm of this centenary project visited New York City and I was able to host him at Colonia Verde for lunch. A trick that I do when wine makers are in town and my distributor reaches out to taste is that I offer to host lunch. Lunch time means at least a full hour (extremely long hang time for NYC standards) and real time to connect to the minds and hearts of wine makers. The offer is incentivized by our type of food. Since Latin American cuisine is usually non existent in the regions these wine makers are coming from, lunch becomes a discovery point for all! I get to learn from the source, wine makers get to test their spice level. Some wine professionals will say that spice and food are a distraction when tasting wine so those who say yes to my lunch invitation let me know right away - These are my kind of wine people! Unafraid to taste wine at a table with food and conversation to get lost in. In other words, tasting wine in the real context of where wine actually lives.

In this context is where I tasted the Finca Suarez Chardonnay and it moved me to my core. I was tasting limestone and vibrancy. ‘Juanfa, que es este stonyness deliciosooo?!’ I said in my Spanglish wine language, a mesh of technical in English with Spanish sprinkled in for emotion. He explained to me that his finca rubs shoulders with the mountains and that the soils have this particular mix of alluvial rock with limestone that has rolled down the Andean mountains. This soil is colloquially called ‘Caliche Blanco’.

Damn. My mind was broken as I was unable to place what I was tasting with our standardized way of thinking of Argentinian wines - Fruity. Red. Malbec. Period. Juanfa then took me through his Malbecs, the same uniqueness happened there. His ‘Caliche Blanco Malbec’ had white pepper, an intriguing savory note and limestone undertones, all things I had never tasted in that grape before. ‘Wow Juanfa esto es, pero no es Malbec!’. Malbec that is but isn’t. He confirmed what I was thinking, he felt the same. But not just with his malbecs. ’I am starting to taste Malbec that goes back to our beginnings….old school malbec’ Juanfa said to me. Something was going on here, and I needed to explore more. The lunch marked me, I was on a mission to taste more of Argentina.

There is no better way to know that a wine region is drastically improving then by by drinking its most butchered grape. You want to see about Galicia, go drink Albariños, you want to understand the state of affairs in Cali, go drink Cabernet Sauvignon. You’ll get a sense quickly, weather a region is stagnant or its vibrating. I wanted to see what was up in Argentina so I went and made back to back appointments with my reps to taste Malbec, something I wouldn’t intuitively do to be honest. I was curious to see what was on the other side. I went across the board, from classic portfolios to the more wild natural ones.

Oh shit. There is something happening in Argentina, so I learned. The malbecs I was tasting had a new energy to them with an old soul, they had a sprint about them. It was Malbec letting itself be seen - Less adulterated, less distractions of oak, the fruit being just the gateway to more. With the tastings also came other white wines, mostly Semillon and some interesting takes on their known Torrontes grape. I was activated.

I had to go see, with my very own eyes, what was happening in Argentina. And here I am, on a flight to Argentina, to follow Malbec’s return back home, to drown in melancholy and to follow my hunch that there’s a new wave happening there, and I want to be there to catch it.