Bodega Piedra Negra

The Free Bacchus Story

François Lurton is the fourth generation of a Bordeaux wine family that has made wine there since 1897. He looked at several regions of Argentina before planting in the Uco Valley, at 1,100 metres in the foothills of the Andes, on poor, gravelly soil the bodega likens to Pessac-Léognan. He built Bodega Piedra Negra on 200 hectares of land nobody had farmed, in what later became the Geographical Indication of Los Chacayes, and named his best wine after the place.

Malbec came to Argentina from south-west France, where it is called Côt, and in Mendoza it became the country's signature grape. The Uco Valley is the high, cool end of Mendoza, 80 kilometres south of the city. Rain here is under 300 millimetres a year, so the vines are drip-irrigated, and a summer day of 30 to 35 degrees can drop to 5 or 10 at night. Hail is the danger, and the whole vineyard sits under nets. Lurton added French selections of Côt to the old Argentine Malbec selections, so the estate grows both versions of the grape.

Ecocert certifies the estate organic, for the grapes and the winemaking, under Argentine, European and US rules. The certificate covers the Los Chacayes estate only, and not every Piedra Negra wine has come from it: the bodega's own sheet for the 2013 Gran Malbec says most of its Malbec was grown in Agrelo and La Consulta.

Chacayes comes from the estate's best plots. One hectare of it is planted at 20,000 vines, more than four times the density of the rest of the vineyard, and it is Côt and Malbec together. The grapes are picked by hand, sorted twice by two teams, partly fermented in 400-litre French oak barrels that are turned, and aged for 24 months in new French oak.