Mendoza, Argentina — MATiAS MAYOL slowly pours a bottle of his family's Malbec wine into a 3-foot-deep hole in the backyard of his cousin's Mendoza, Argentina, home and silently prays: \o7Pachamama, you have blessed Argentina with four great Malbec harvests in a row. How about five for five?
\f7Mayol's Italian-Argentine family subscribes to the ancient Incan belief that, if you take care of Mother Earth -- \o7Pachamama \f7-- she'll take care of you. So, following the wine, a potful of pumpkin and hominy stew, several still-steaming empanadas and handfuls of olives from the family's trees go into the hole as offerings to the goddess.
The old lady must like Malbec. Mendoza, Argentina's premier wine region, has been blessed with year after year of textbook-perfect vineyard weather. The red wines, particularly the Malbecs, from 2005 may be Argentina's best vintage ever.
For Mayol, as for many other Argentine vintners, the good fortune is timely. He's part of a recent boom that means new wineries and improved viticulture dedicated to making world-class wines. Today, he can take full advantage of \o7Pachamama's\f7 largesse.
Argentine wine is coming of age, says James Wolpert, chairman of viticulture and enology at UC Davis. And the potential for continued improvement is a little frightening to the rest of the winemaking world. "It's Argentina's turn to knock us out of our chairs," he says. "And they are doing it with a grape that no one's ever done it with before."
Malbec, the dominant grape grown in Argentina, has become its signature wine grape. Originally a minor Bordeaux blending grape, Malbec is ignored everywhere else in the world except in Cahors, France, where the varietal is a regional table wine.
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Malbec mystery
HOW Malbec evolved into such a charmer in Argentina remains a bit of an enological mystery. The clues lie in a combination of terroir, Darwinian selection and the influence of international consultants bent on modernizing a calcified wine industry.
"Something strange happened to Malbec in the soils and climate of Argentina. It mutated," says Steve Clifton, a Santa Ynez Valley winemaker whose Palmina and Brewer-Clifton wines have made him one of that region's tastemakers. Clifton, who along with Joe Bastianich (co-owner with Mario Batali of several restaurants in New York and wineries in Italy) has partnered with Mayol, is one of a handful of outsiders staking a claim in Mendoza. "It's all about the climate," says Clifton.
