Is there Pinot Noir outside Burgundy?! Argentine Pinot Noir
- adrianlatimer61
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
A stupid, unserious question naturally, of course there is. But given the endless hype about Burgundy and stratospheric demand and pricing, it does beg answering. And I’m not going to cover the obvious alternatives in Oregon or California, or New Zealand, or Alsace and Sancerre. No, I’m going to a country really known only for one grape which is very far removed from Pinot.
Argentina.
And to make it a bit more interesting, let’s add some extreme altitude into the mix or if that’s too dull, how about extreme latitude?
I’ve written before on this blog about the most southern wine in the world – Otronia, so I will not repeat myself, but their Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are remarkably good. Just a bit further north but still in the province of Chubut are the wineries in the Valley of the 16th October such as Casa Yague and Contra Corrientes. You have to remember that all of these vineyards are in the foothills of the Andes well south in Patagonia, where the wind is endless, the sun unreliable and the frost potentially annihilating.
But these wines are only found in situ, and difficult to buy in Europe, so let’s head to the north of Patagonia, just south of Mendoza in Rio Negro province and maybe Argentina’s best known Pinot estate, Chacra, run by the family which owns no less than Sassicaia in Tuscany. But I have written about that previously too.
And if we then leapfrog Mendoza to the far north and Salta province, bordering Bolivia and the Atacama Desert, well here we drop the crazy latitude for austronautical elevation. Colome’s Altura Maxima vineyard is planted at 3,111 metres (over 10,000 feet) and, yes, apart from the famed Malbec, there is also Pinot. But that too has featured here in former posts.
The one thing that I would say about all these Argentina Pinots is that they are ‘pretty wines’ and I mean that as a compliment. They have a bright but palish pinky-red colour, floral aromatics and red fruit and are quite delicate and elegant, with usually about 12.5% alcohol. They are delicious to drink, all of them, but they do not have the weight, longevity or complexity of a grand cru Burgundy. And of course they cost a fraction of the price. If you want a good value glass of real Pinot with finesse and nice balance, you can do a lot worse. I think the critics’ scores are (as usual) highly exaggerated, but they are genuine wines of pleasure and affordable, which is not a frequent descriptor for Pinot.
When I was in Argentina in January, I read Tim Atkin MW’s Argentina Report and noted that his pick for Argentina Pinot also included Domaine Nico. I’d heard the name, but rather ignored it as it was in Mendoza which I think of as hot and predominantly Malbec (or Cabernet) territory. But then I remembered that the most renowned Chardonnay in the country (and probably in South America) comes from the Adrianna vineyard in Gualtallary in Tupungato, Valle de Uco, Mendoza. Grown up around the thousand metres and part of Laura Catena’s high class wine empire.
So when I did a quick internet search and found that Domaine Nico was owned by Franco- and Pinotphile Laura Catena in Tupungato, well…
There are five wines, grown from 1100 to 1450 metres high, and apart from the top Paradis cuvee which comes in at over 200 euros, they sell for between 29 and 50 euros, which in Burgundian terms gets you very little other than the ‘bottom’ of the hierarchy. It’s also less than most of the wines I mentioned above. So, in value terms it looks interesting.
I managed to find two 2020s, a 29 euro Grandmere and a 48 euro Savante. Time to discover what the Valle de Uco could do with the thin-skinned and notoriously fickle Pinot at altitude.
Both wines came in at 13.5% so a little more body than in Patagonia or way up high in Salta, but nothing excessive (indeed, the same as in Burgundy or at least as Burgundy is/was in less sunny vintages nowadays).
So how was the grandmother, up at 1120 metres in Villa Bastias in Tupungato? Planted in 2013 in gravel, loam and then round alluvial rocks coated in limestone (as in Adrianna) with Dijon Clones 667 & 115. The colour is pale, a touch bricky, the palate coated with gentle caramelly oak, nice red fruit a touch sauvage or gamey, slightly thick with nice finishing acidity, a bit short but elegant and just great value.
La Savante, the erudite lady, is older, from 1994 with clones 115 and 777 in Gualtallary, Here we have sandy loam, reddish-hued compact calcium carbonate, then boulder debris 5 cm in thickness, with dispersed calcium carbonate. The wine tastes a bit more sophisticated, the texture less thick, tighter, the fruit higher toned, savoury with a touch of whole cluster stems. I suspect it might age a bit longer too. And, again, good value.
As we will be in the Valle de Uco in January, I’m delighted to have discovered an Argentine domaine that makes such elegant and nice Pinots at equally elegant and nice prices.
And before I sign off, I wanted to copy a post from Catena’s renowned winemaker Alejandro Vigil. I found it highly interesting, especially in these days of ever warmer sunshine. He shows the consequence of the excess warmth, though last week in France, especially in Champagne and Chablis, we had temperatures down to -6.5C which given that the buds are already out, can be catastrophic and literally freeze the year’s crop to death before a grape has been grown.
It’s weird – a decade ago it was around the 5th of April that we’d get the heavy frosts and the buds would be out, but now it was the 28 March. A week earlier. Social media was awash with pictures of vineyards at midnight twinkling with thousands of candle lights trying to warm up the air. Or infrared thermal heaters or efforts to circulate the air and stop the coldest layer from sinking on top of the vines and freezing them.
In France it’s customary to give ladies a sprig of muguet (lilley of the valley) on May 1st, and when I moved to this house in 2003, it was a toss up if the wild muguet in the forest would be flowering in time. Now it’s a matter of whether it’s already flowered and finished, and today (April 9th) I see the first flowers are out, so they will be long gone by May.
The wealthiest domaines might be able to save the crop from these spring freezes, but the costs of manpower in the middle of the night lighting all the candles, or the various ‘heating’ and air circulation systems are beyond most. And the lesser wines are generally lower down the slope where of course the coldest air likes to collect and the vignerons have no margins to spend battling the icy cold.
And if you manage to survive all that, you then run the gauntlet of sunburn, excess sugars and still unripe tannins. It’s ironic in that whilst Instagram was full of comments on the frosts, there were also several obituaries to the famed Bordeaux ‘flying winemaker’ Michel Rolland who passed away at 78. He was a friend of Robert Parker and certainly consulted on and helped make wines all round the world in the style that garnered his higher scores, full of ripeness and alcohol. Looking at the two bunches of grapes and Alejandro Vigil’s comments, you can see that his attitude to winemaking today is at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Postscript - ‘The Wine in My Glass’
‘Loving this wine memoir from Adrian Latimer. A must for those who love great stories and writing, albeit primarily about wine. And it’s all in a good cause. All profits go to the Vendanges Solidaires association which helps winemakers who are suffering due to extreme weather conditions…’
Hermione Ireland, Managing Director Academie du Vin Library
After some encouragement and a fair few blog posts, I published (Sept 2025) a book about my travels in the wine world - the people, places and, of course, wines. I am not a professional, so everything I say is objective and unbiased (so I can criticise when other journalists do not dare to do so for instance) and any profits will go to the Vendanges Solidaires association which was set up in 2016 to help winemakers who are in trouble after suffering the extreme weather conditions (frost, hail, fire, flood etc) which sadly are becoming ever more frequent: www.vendangessolidaires.com.
The book ranges from California to Sicily, via Salta, Jujuy and Patagonia in Argentina, Valtellina, Piemonte and Tuscany in Italy, Madeira and of course all over France (Burgundy, Chablis, Sancerre, Beaujolais, Bordeaux, the Rhone).
If you have found any pleasure and/or interest in this blog, I think you might enjoy it, especially as it has been brilliantly illustrated by Arabella Langlands-Perry who managed to juggle bringing up two young kids, helping run Maceo/Willi’s Wine Bar in Paris and producing artwork with an abundance of both talent and wit. Brava.
‘The Wine in My Glass – Tales of Wines, Winemakers and Places’
Published by The Medlar Press Limited, Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, autumn 2025. www.medlarpress.com
Available from Medlar in UK, and/or from me in France or Willis Wine Bar in Paris.
Price UK Pounds 26 from Medlar or 35 Euros. All profits to charity.
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