Top 10 intriguing things about Argentina and its wines

Argentina and its wines

1. Argentina is the world’s fifth largest producer of wine.
2. Eighty percent of Argentina’s wine comes from Mendoza, South America’s largest wine producing region. (Yesterday, I wrote about the Grove Street Malbec. This is where the wine got its origin.)
3. Spanish missionaries planted the first Vitis vinifera wine grapes in Argentina around 1550.
4. Grapevines were shipped across the Atlantic by Michel A. Pouget, a French agronomist.
5. Argentina boasts having the finest Malbec vines in the world, because they’ve not ever had phyloxxera, nor have they been grafted like elsewhere in the world, including France – Think Bordeaux.
6. More Malbec is grown in Argentina than anywhere else in the world.
7. The small town of Maipú, near  Mendoza, is so packed with wineries that it’s easy to hit five or six in a day.
   1. I never want to visit more than three in a day, because I will learn more about those three and have more intimate memories.
8. Argentina’s Torrontés is a naturally occurring cross between Criolla negra and Muscat of Alexandria.
9. Cabernet Franc is flourishing in Argentina as a cultivar.
10. The Grape Harvest Festival in Argentina is world class, according to the Travel Channel.
    1. So it must be great… being right up there with Boston’s Wine Festival.
    2. I would have picked the Santa Fe Chile and Wine Festival, personally, having been numerous times to all US wine festivals within the Continental US, but that’s another story.