Will's Adventure to the Vineyard

Editor’s Note: Today, Bill’s eldest son, Will, tells us about a trip to the family ranch in Argentina that nearly killed him…

…but which proved to be very fruitful indeed!

Suddenly, it was pitch black…

I realized that the truck’s headlights had gone under the roaring water.

I began to feel the front wheels lift up as the truck slowly turned with the current of the flood…

The woman in the seat next to me screamed. In the back seat, Gustavo began praying to the Virgin Mary.

It was at that point that I began to question the wisdom of traveling 5,000 miles by plane… then another 500 miles in a smaller plane… and then taking a six-hour, off-road trek – on the one day a year it rains in Northwestern Argentina…

…all to find a single bottle of dark red wine – so opaque, it’s known as “black wine” – grown at extreme altitude (above 8,000 feet)… in a valley so remote, only a Bonner would ever go there.

Hooked

But I’m getting ahead of myself… Let’s start at the beginning…

I first arrived in Argentina in 2006, when I moved my family to Buenos Aires. Around the same time, my father acquired an isolated ranch in the Andean foothills in the far-northwest of the country.

As it turned out, the ranch was far too remote and dry to sustain itself purely on cattle or farming.

*Bill Bonner – publisher-turned-cattle-rancher*

But riding across the property one day, we came to a small valley that was fed by a thin trickle of water snaking its way down from the mountains…

And there, gnarled and overgrown, we discovered a long-forgotten vineyard of malbec grapes. They had been planted by the previous ranch owner as an experiment.

Remarkably, what we had discovered, right there on our ranch, was one of the highest-altitude vineyards in the world… at over 8,400 feet…

…and a remote wine region unlike any other.

When I popped my first bottle of extreme-altitude Argentine wine… and hints of balsamic, leather, and camphor wood drifted across my palate…

…I was hooked.

Wine Cheats

You see, over the years, I had grown flat-out bored, unimpressed, and bummed out by just about every wine in my local store!

Here’s why:

First, there’s a lot of cheating in that cheap wine from your local supermarket:

When they can’t afford oak barrels, winemakers use oak “flavoring” and other additives
When the wine isn’t dark enough, they add a purple dye called “Mega Purple” (far more common than you think)
When the wine has any hint of sediment from the soil and air (which is what makes wines unique – the goût de terroir, as the French say)… they use “fining agents” like potassium ferrocyanide (yes “-cyanide”)
When there’s a hint of bad weather, they harvest the grapes while they’re still green… and cover it up by adding sugar!

You can see why the alcohol industry fights tooth and nail to avoid putting a list of ingredients on labels, spending as much as $30 million on lobbying last year.

But it gets worse…

Did you know that a 2013 study from France found traces of pesticides in 90% of wines sold in supermarkets there?

And a lab test of 10 Californian wines found the weed-killer glyphosate in every single bottle.

Commercial winemakers have stripped out the richness and the character of wine – everything that makes a bottle burst with life – and added a lot of stuff you don’t want!

True Beauty

Contrast that to the wine I came across in Argentina’s Valle Calchaquí, where our ranch is situated…

It’s unfiltered… made with indigenous yeast and hand-picked grapes… and fined with natural egg whites rather than chemicals…

And because of the isolation and extreme conditions up where the grapes grow, the high levels of pesticides found in regions like Bordeaux and California are simply unnecessary.

The levels of residual sugar are also a fraction of those found in most wines.

But the true beauty of this wine is the remarkable flavor…

Some people claim you can actually taste a slight hint of smoke carried down into our valley from the lonely campfires that burn out on the high desert plains…

…as cowboys lay out under the stars, their ponchos wrapped tightly around them to protect them from the howling winds that sweep across this seemingly endless expanse…

…where my truck found itself ensnared in a flash flood.

To be continued next weekend…

Regards,

Will Bonner
Founder, Bonner Private Wine Partnership

P.S. Care to discover what wine made at 8,000 feet above the world tastes like? We have a limited number of bottles from the third-highest vineyard in the world (8,950 feet), plus a 90-point masterpiece from the reclusive winemaker behind our own Tacana, for you to claim. Reserve yours by clicking here…