LUJAN DE CUYO

Producers in this heartland of Argentinian Malbec credit the identity and diversity of their wines to the old vines they nurture. It’s a region where tradition is preserved and protected, even as tastes evolve and new styles emerge, discovers Amanda Barnes.

-  Amanda Barnes

The headquarters of Malbec and Argentina’s wine industry, Luján de Cuyo may not be garnering the same buzz as emerging wine regions in the Uco valley and Patagonia, but it is very much the heart and mind of Argentina’s wine industry – and it has at its feet some of the oldest vines in the country.

When you pull into Luján de Cuyo, driving 20 minutes south from Mendoza city, an enormous metal sculpture of a Malbec leaf announces that you’ve arrived at the tierra de Malbec. While arguably all of Argentina’s wine regions can claim to be a ‘land of Malbec’, no region has quite as big a stake to this claim as Luján – which has more than 15,500ha under vine, more than half of it Malbec. Luján alone has more Malbec vines than all of France.

Claiming almost a fifth of all of Argentina’s Malbec vineyards, it was here in Luján that the story of Argentina’s famed Malbec began. When Michel Aimé Pouget first planted Malbec in 1853, in what is now a paved-over block in Mendoza city centre, it changed the landscape of Argentinian wine from a sea of Criolla (the ‘founding’ varieties originally brought in by Spanish colonists) to a land of exotic French and European grapes.

Back then, Malbec was simply known as the cepa francesca (‘French grape’). Plantings proliferated southwards, and Malbec adapted particularly well to the rocky clay soils, cooling mountain influence and abundant water supply in Luján de Cuyo, which blossomed into Argentina’s premier wine region.