Malcolm Jolley: Three days in Buenos Aires, one of the world’s great wine cities 

If you were looking for an escape from gloomy November in Canada, I doubt there’s a better one than Buenos Aires. It’s late spring here and the weather is perfect. The temperature is in the mid to high twenties during the day, and there is almost always a breeze from the River Platte to the north, or maybe the ocean to the east or the Andes to the west. Good air, indeed.

It’s warm because the sun is shining and it’s that plentiful light from it that makes the November escape so good. By flipping hemispheres my little group of Canadian travellers have gone from short days to long ones. The sun is high in the sky, with few clouds to interrupt it and the light is clear and sharp in high relief.

That sun must surely be shining a thousand kilometres away in Mendoza, where most Argentine wine is grown and made, including what will become the 2025 vintage in a few months. Our little group is doing our best to make room for the new wine by trying as much as we can of the stuff that’s already been bottled.

What we have been trying has included everything from cheap mystery glasses produced from behind the bar in old cafés at lunch to considerably less cheap bottles selected with help from sommeliers at Michelin-starred restaurants at dinner.

Our verdict, a few days in, is that Buenos Aires is one of the great wine cities of the world.

We shouldn’t be surprised. For every bottle of Argentine wine that is exported and sold abroad, three are consumed at home. The biggest market is, of course, the capital region, where a third of the country’s population resides. The modern Argentine wine industry can be traced to the establishment of the 1,000 km railway that linked Mendoza to Buenos Aires in 1885.

Buenos Aires caught the nickname the “Paris of the South” for its grand boulevards, built at the height of its prosperity from the mid-18th century through the early 19th. There are times walking through it, when it might also pass for a South American version of Rome, Barcelona, Naples, or another city of the Western Mediterranean. To a Canadian tourist, it feels very European.

This character extends beyond architecture to the essence of any city: its people. Residents call themselves porteños; they are the people of the port. Buenos Aires docked the ships that brought more than six million Europeans to South America. The plurality were Italians (about 45 percent), followed closely by Spanish (about a third). These people were wine people and a lot of them stayed.

Porteños aren’t just wine people, they’re food people. They’re wine with food people. Buenos Aires is a big city that’s densely populated. People like to go out and the restaurant game here is good at every level.

Parrilla means grill, but here it really means a restaurant where they cook over hardwood coals. What they mostly cook is beef, but it could be used for anything, even vegetables. Throughout the day in Buenos Aires, in every neighbourhood we have walked through, we could smell wood (not charcoal) smoke.

Don Julio, in the residential neighbourhood of Palermo, is one of the city’s most famous parrillas whose motto simply promises meat and wine. Porteños have dinner late. Arriving for a 9:30 reservation we found the restaurant was packed and continued to seat new diners past 11 o’clock.

Cuts of cow are the main attraction, followed closely by Malbec, Argentina’s signature red grape. On the Don Julio list are two pages of Malbec wines, ranging in price from around $2,000 to $20 a bottle. We ordered a bottle of Susana Balbo’s 2022 Signature Malbec, full of black fruit and violets, possibly from the touch of (4 percent) Petit Verdot it’s made from. It plays off the giant grass-fed striploin we are sharing beautifully.

Another night we dined at Crizia, a Michelin-starred restaurant that specializes in seafood from Patagonia. We had a fashionably late reservation, so had white wine at our hotel for an aperitif before heading to the restaurant. Could we switch to red that paired with everything from oysters to delicate white fish from the South Atlantic?

We could. First, with oysters on the half shell, a 2023 Barda Pinot Noir from the Rio Negro Valley in the South of Argentina, where the climate is cool. Then, things got weird and to go with asparagus with poached egg and anchovy, we ordered a 2022 Ver Sacrum Garnacha (Grenache) from the Uco Valley in Mendoza. Grown in high elevation, the Garnacha proved as delicate as the Pinot Noir.

To top the Garnacha, I needed the help of our sommelier. Could this young man recommend another red? The main course was a delicate white fish served in a “sea foam” of bubbly butter.

I was intrigued when our sommelier turned the pages to the long list of Malbec. I agreed blindly to the 2019 Calcàreo “Super Uco” from Michilini Sammartino in Mendoza. Malbec with fish seemed like a stretch, but the professional assured me he thought we’d like it.

We certainly liked it. The Malbec showed raspberry and floral notes and moved in synch with the delicate fish-like (please forgive the stereotype) like a couple of tango dancers.

At other meals, we moved away from Malbec, flipping between the high-altitude vineyards of Mendoza to the high Southern latitude of Rio Negra, to try Merlot, Carignan and, of course, Cabernet Sauvignon. Before the reds, we have tried—and enjoyed—wines made with the typical Argentine whites like the aromatic Torrontes and Criolla, as well as the most international of all grapes, Chardonnay.

In the wake of the disaster we call the Falklands War, Argentina moved from a military dictatorship to a functioning democracy in the 1980s. This precipitated foreign and renewed domestic investment, and by the 1990s the Argentine wine industry had modernized and become an important exporter.

The bulk of those exports have been stylistically boring, as mass-production wines often are. In Buenos Aires, I have experienced a far wider spectrum of Argentine wines that has been anything but boring. More importantly, I have experienced them in their natural habitat: at the table.