Argentine Wine - History

History

Viticulture was introduced to Argentina during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and later again by Christian missionaries. In 1556 father Juan Cedrón established the first vineyard in Argentina with cuttings from the Chilean Central Valley were brought to what is now the San Juan and Mendoza wine region which firmly established viticulture in Argentina. Ampelographers suspect that one of these cuttings brought the ancestor grape of the Chile's Pais and California's Mission grape. This grape was the forerunner of the Criolla Chica variety that would be the backbone of the Argentine wine industry for the next 300 years.

The first recorded commercial vineyard was established at Santiago del Estero in 1557 by Jesuit missionaries which was followed by expansion of vineyard plantings in Mendoza in the early 1560s and San Juan between 1569 and 1589. During this time the missionaries and settlers in the area began construction of complex irrigation channels and dams that would bring water down from the melting glaciers of the Andes to sustain vineyards and agriculture. While a provincial governor, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento instructed the French agronomist Miguel Aimé Pouget to bring grapevine cutting from France to Argentina. Of the vines that Pouget brought were the very first Malbec vines to be planted in country. As the infantile Argentine wine industry became centralized in the western part of country among the foothills of the mountains, the population centers of the country developed in the east. Transporting wine by means of a long wagon journey put a crimp in the growth of the wine industry that would not be eased till the 1885 completion of the Argentine railway that connected the city of Mendoza to Buenos Aires. Don Tiburcio Benegas, governor of the province of Mendoza and owner of El Trapiche wine estate, was instrumental in financing and pushing through the construction, convinced that in order for the Argentine wine industry to survive it needed a market. The 19th century also saw the first wave of immigrants from Europe. Many of these immigrants were escaping the scourge of the phylloxera epidemic that ravaged vineyards in their homeland and they brought with them their expertise and winemaking knowledge to their new home.