Mendoza wine country, valley by valley

Mendoza grows wine the way the rest of Argentina grows cattle: at scale, and with opinions. Nearly all of it sits between 700 and 1,500 metres on the dry side of the Andes, watered by snowmelt through a canal system the Huarpe built and the Spanish extended. Altitude is the thing to hold on to — it is what gives the Malbec here its colour and its grip.

Three areas carry most of what a visitor will drink.

Maipú: the old one, and the easy one

Closest to the city, lowest, warmest. Maipú is where Mendoza’s wine industry started, and it still has the nineteenth-century bodegas and the olive oil producers to show for it. It is also the only area you can reasonably do by bicycle — flat, close together, well served.

The wines are rounder and softer than the altitude regions. Plenty of people treat Maipú as the warm-up day.

Luján de Cuyo: the Malbec heartland

Half an hour south of the city, 900 to 1,100 metres. This is where Malbec was rehabilitated into a serious wine in the 1990s, and where the old vines are — some plantings go back eighty years. Expect darker, firmer wines than Maipú and a denser concentration of big names.

Practical note: the famous addresses here take bookings, often weeks ahead, and several no longer accept walk-ins at all.

Valle de Uco: the high one

An hour and a half south, between 1,000 and 1,700 metres, against the wall of the cordillera. The Uco is the newest of the three and the most dramatic to look at — vineyards running straight at the Andes, the architecture self-consciously modern.

The altitude shows in the glass: more acidity, tighter tannins, more perfume. It is also the furthest apart. Two wineries in the Uco is a full day, and trying for four means spending it in the car.

Planning a day that works

• Book everything. Walk-in tastings have largely disappeared at the known producers.
• Three wineries is the ceiling, two in the Uco.
• Don’t drive. Argentina’s drink-driving limit in Mendoza province is zero. Hire a driver, take a tour, or cycle in Maipú.
• Eat at one of them. The long winery lunch is the point, not an add-on.
• Go in the morning in summer; the afternoon heat flattens both the vineyard and your palate.

Beyond the tasting room

The harvest is the obvious draw, but the off-season has its own case: pruning in winter, flowering in October, and in any month the Alta Montaña road west from Mendoza — Potrerillos, Uspallata, Puente del Inca, the Aconcagua lookout — which turns the wine trip into something closer to a mountain one.