From Mendoza, where something like 95% of Argentina’s wine comes, drive west. That means a lot of driving up towards the Andes, through ever drier valleys at higher elevation, until at 1500 meters you’re in the Calingasta valley, where rain rarely falls and the Rio de los Patos only really flows when the snow melts in the andes, when it briefly becomes a wide river and gives irrigation canals water for the narrow strip of agriculture in Calingasta. While generally hot and sunny in the summer, this is also where Argentina’s coldest temperature ever was recorded, at -39C. It is a marginal place to grow grapes, but people have done it for almost three hundred years. Francisco (Pancho) Bugallo and Nuria Añó Gargiulo met in Mendoza, studying, respectively, agricultural engineering and industrial design. If it was their shared affection for rock climbing that drew them into the mountains, it was vine growing that kept them there, founding Cara Sur winery in 2011. In 2021, they found a plot of very old vines called Paraje Hilario in the bone dry Calingasta Valley, filled with old grapes left behind in Argentina’s mad rush towards Bordeaux grapes. Farmed organically, grazed and fertilized by sheep, and trained in the parral system, it is a place out of time. The vines are still fed by the ancient acequia irrigation ditches, which carry water down from the glaciers of the high Andes. Francisco and Nuria farm simply, and they make the wine simply, in concrete tanks and with minimal intervention. They make wine little different from what the missionaries would have made in the 1780s.

This is the wine made from the white grapes first planted here by missionaries. Torrontés Sanjuanino and Torrontes Mendocino with small quantities of Malvasia and Maticha. After two weeks fermentation on the skins, the free run juice – never pressed – was rested in concrete for seven months without temperature control. Despite the powerfully dry climate, the wine in 2024 developed a thin veil of flor yeast, giving a unique flavor profile combining a rocky, mineral mountain note of tangy, fresh lemon acidity with a herbaceous sorrel-leaf aroma and a saline, stony finish.