Continued from Part 4 of Argentine Wine
The 1982 Falklands War with Britain also didn’t help the economy or exports. Then there was hyper-inflation that exceeded 3,000 percent a month, which discouraged foreign investment.
Vintners made up for the lost revenue by producing high volumes of poor-quality wines that smelled like bananas rotting in an attic.
Meanwhile, neighboring Chile’s economy was much more stable and the country was already producing more wine than it could consume, so it was focused on export in the 1980s.
Chile took advantage of this to position itself at the very low end of the market—bottles of wine under $10. (Ironically, Chile has struggled ever since to get up out of that category.)
Argentina started to focus on exports in the 1990s when government subsidies dried up for volume production and there were economic incentives to rip out inferior vines.
How did all this affect Nicolás Catena? In 1991, he shipped his first vintage to the United States and faced the dilemma of how to price his wines.
At that time, the most expensive Argentine wines sold in the U.S. cost $4 and those from Chile were $6.
Nicolás made the gutsy move to price his Chardonnay above the vinous ghetto at $13 and his Cabernet Sauvignon at $15.
Fellow producers told him he was crazy, but word of the wine’s quality spread and he sold the entire vintage’s production in two months. Still, it took another five years before the North American market fully accepted the Catena wines as part of that price segment.
I ask him which wines are the best in the world today. However, the professor dodges the question with a theoretical explanation:
“If you accept that the dynamics of the market economy reflect the value judgments of its participants, then the best wine is the most expensive one.”
And do critics influence which wines the market deems best?
“Critics increase market efficiency, but the consumer ultimately decides which is the best wine—and who is the best critic,” he says smiling at me.
“I am market-driven: I make wines that please people. If people did not like my wines, I would change them,” he says. The multi-millionaire businessman is back.
Warming to his theme, he tells me that he believes that wine allows people to show their affective side.
“I cannot prove this theory of course,” he says earnestly, raising a finger. “But I have seen it many times.
When you bring out a bottle of wine, something in your emotional, sensing nature is revealed. This is why people often drink wine with those they are fond of.”
As it happens, I am terribly fond of this Catena Zapata Malbec. It floods my senses with a wanton perfume of violets and black plums.
There’s an unabashed Latin fire in the glass with a lick of French polish.
“We’re still scaling the Andes for cooler sites, taking vines to the very limit of cultivation,” Nicolás says, his eyes moving up the mountains in front of us.
“We are not producing our finest wines yet. That challenge is always ahead of us—we are always pursuing it.”
