Malbec country — vines at the foot of the Andes, the best wine in South America
Mendoza (1,200m altitude, under the eastern Andes, 1,000km from Buenos Aires) is the wine capital of South America and the definitive address for Malbec — the Bordeaux grape that grew better here than anywhere in France after arriving in 1853. The province has 1,800 bodegas, several of them architecturally ambitious destination buildings (Zuccardi Valle de Uco, voted World's Best Winery 2019; Achaval Ferrer; Clos de los Siete). The city itself was entirely rebuilt after the 1861 earthquake on a grid with deliberately wide streets; the food scene runs from traditional asado to restaurants that…
Mendoza was founded in 1561 by Spanish colonists crossing from Chile — unusually, established from the Pacific side because the Andes crossing over Paso Los Libertadores was faster than traversing the Pampas from Buenos Aires. The 1861 earthquake (estimated 7.2 magnitude) destroyed the colonial city entirely in 20 seconds; the rebuilt grid (wide streets, interior plazas, no building taller than 4 stories) was a deliberate seismic-engineering response. Malbec arrived 8 years before the earthquake, brought by French viticulture professor Michel Pouget in 1853 on behalf of Argentine president Do…