I have been in Mendoza for two and a half days now, and it has been a remarkable time. I have been with Catena’s Instituteof Wine, a research department bringing together academic resources with those of the winery, to look at some very interesting questions in wine research, in a scientifically credible way.

For now, some pictures from excursions into the vineyards, beginning with the picture above, which is taken from Catena’s winery, looking down the Pyramide vineyard in Agrelo. The rest are from the high altitude (1450 m) Adrianna vineyard in the Uco Valley, which is one of the best studied of all vineyards in the world.

This is Lot 1, the first part of Adrianna planted here in 1992. There weren’t any other vineyards around here when this was planted.

Some of the Catena Wine Institute team

Mate – a strong form of local tea.

The clonal Malbec selection made by Catena. This was from plant material taken from Lot 18 of their Anglelica vineyard,planted some 80 years ago. The Malbec clones came from France in 1853 pre-phylloxera. When phylloxera hit France, it was a viticultural bottleneck and lots of interesting clones were lost there. Catena have studied 134 of these clones, and compared them with some of the remainingFrench ones.

Stones with some limestone on the surface.

Hail netting: many of the blocks are protected against hail, which is quite common here.