Fork in the Road
A Wine-focused Journey Through Argentina
Argentina is hard to do in one trip. Not because it's complicated, but because it's big, physically and otherwise. The country has a way of pulling you in different directions before you've even landed, and Buenos Aires alone could eat up nearly a week without trying. So, we usually start there.
The city is charismatic in a way that's almost unfair to other cities. Recoleta is grand and leafy, all wide boulevards and buildings that look like they were lifted from Paris and set down in South America. Palacio Duhau fits right in, elegant without being cold, the kind of hotel that makes you want to dress for dinner. Palermo Soho is the other end of the spectrum: creative, a little scrappy, with a great restaurant scene, often tucked into converted houses and denser parts of the city. San Telmo has tango and antiques and that lived-in grit that the guidebooks romanticize, and mostly they're right to.
Give it a few days. Eat the steak. Drink the Malbec at lunch, which is completely acceptable here. Walk until your feet complain. Buenos Aires rewards the wanderer more than the planner.
We'd also recommend a couple of nights outside the city, an hour or so drive away to La Bamba de Areco. This overwhelmingly charming 19th-century estancia has been converted into a hotel without losing any of what makes it worth visiting. The dark red buildings, the enormous shaded grounds, the stables…it all still feels like a working ranch, just one where you wake up in the morning without a plan and somehow fill your day with activities on the grounds.
Around one o'clock someone from the staff will track you down, wherever you've ended up, to hand you an empanada and let you know where lunch is being served that day. It moves around but always includes asado. Maybe a horseback ride beforehand, maybe a nap after. The property only has ten rooms, and all meals are shared, so by the end of the first day you'll know your fellow guests whether you planned to or not. Usually a good thing.
This place has a sense of lived-in Argentine culture. It's a worthwhile detour before the city swallows you whole.
Then the trip forks.
In this choose-your-own-destiny Argentinian adventure, the first option is Mendoza. The obvious choice, and a good one. A short flight west puts you in the shadow of the Andes, which are bigger and closer than you're expecting, and suddenly everything…the wine, the air, the pace of the days, makes sense in relation to them.
The Uco Valley is where the serious stuff happens. High elevation, volcanic soils, temperatures that swing wildly between day and night, the conditions are almost perversely perfect for Malbec and a handful of other grapes. The Vines sits on 1,500 acres of private vineyard and is the right base for all of it: comfortable, unhurried, with mornings that start over breakfast with the vines right outside and afternoons that drift toward whichever bodega has caught your attention.
The tastings here aren't the perfunctory kind. You'll be able to hit up the big names, like Catena Zapata; but, some of the best wineries in the Uco Valley tend to be smaller and run by people with a lot to say about the particular hillside they've staked their reputation on. Pull up a stool. Ask questions. Order a second pour. The cooking here, open fire, whole animals, whatever's in season, is reason enough on its own.
Harvest runs March through April and the valley hums during that stretch. Spring is quieter and just as beautiful. Either works.
The second page you can turn to is Patagonia, where the Argentinian wines at our events were from. This is for the traveler who wants something that takes a little more effort to explain when they get home.
Fly south to El Calafate and the landscape changes entirely. The steppe is vast and windswept and a little disorienting if you're used to cities. EOLO Patagonia is the first stop, a proper estancia out on the plain between El Calafate and the mountains, where the wind makes itself known at all hours and the views from breakfast are genuinely absurd.
From there it opens up. Perito Moreno Glacier, where you strap on crampons and walk on ice that has been moving for the last 18,000 years. Horseback rides through Los Glaciares National Park with gauchos at Estancia Cristina. Kayaking the Río de los Vueltas before lunch at Estancia Bonanza, which is as good an afternoon as any you'll find. And the hike to Laguna de los Tres: long, hard, completely worth it, where Fitz Roy's spires reflect in a glacial lake.
The wine angle in Patagonia is a quieter one and very remote. There's no Uco Valley equivalent down here, the bottles you drink tend to come from the cooler vineyards further north in the country, and you're more likely to encounter them at the end of a long day outdoors than in a formal tasting. But that context does something to them. A glass of Patagonian Pinot at Chaltén Camp, a luxury dome setup with Fitz Roy sitting right in front of you, is a different kind of drinking than anything you'll do in a tasting room. Harder to explain, easier to remember.
Both paths circle back to Buenos Aires, which absorbs you again like you never left. One more dinner, one more late night, the city still going at an hour when most places have long given up.
Argentina will have a way of getting in your head in the best way. You'll be back, probably, already trying to figure out when.
