Despite the economic and political difficulties, against all odds, the cultivation of vineyards and wine production in Cuyo contributed to maintaining a culture that would facilitate the new impulse of the last quarter of the 19th century.
This is testified to by those who visited Mendoza and San Juan between 1820 and 1840. The British Alexander Caldcleugh observed that the “most common class” wine hardly differs from ordinary Málaga, but at Don Manuel Valenzuela’s table I had the opportunity to taste a red wine of much superior quality. (…) the grapes are black and large, and have a lot of flavor”. (1)
Another Englishman, Robert Proctor, in transit to Chile and Peru, arrived in Mendoza in 1823, where he had the opportunity to talk with San Martín, who had returned to Cuyo after resigning from all his positions after the interview with Bolívar in Guayaquil. Proctor was acting as commission agent for the first loan that Peru would sign with the London bank.
In the story of his journey, Proctor said that he found Mendoza white wine “very tolerable” and “there is no doubt that with care and skill in winemaking it will be excellent.”. A few years before, a few barrels had been sent to the United States and obtained the same price as Madeira (…)”. (2)
A look at the wines of the time
For his part, the English chemist and botanist John Miers agreed with Proctor’s assessment of the quality of Mendoza wines: “With due attention paid to preparation this place could produce wines as good as those from anywhere in the world, and with much more economy than any of the wine countries in Europe.” (3)
Miers also mentioned the production of Carlón wine, “very suitable to the taste of the lower classes,” and the harvesting and pressing of grapes in a Mendoza winery around 1819.
In the case you describe, a clay pot was still used for the fermentation of the must, but two pieces of information are interesting: the work was carried out by womenand the wine presses were “deposits made of baked bricks and lime.” (4)
In the following years, the difficulties of competing in the Buenos Aires market of wines led to an important part of the grapes being dedicated to the production of raisins, destined for Chile and Buenos Aires:
Mendoza vineyards with the Cordillera in the background. / Clarín Archive“The economic significance of such by-products is notable. (…), for the second quarter of 1838, 12,165 arrobas of raisins with a value of 119,182 pesos were introduced into Buenos Aires by land, for an import of national wines, in the same period, of 243 pipes and 99 barrels with a total value of 25,500 pesos; and in the second half of the following year the figures were 122,601 pesos for raisins, for a similar sum of wines; and the first half of 1842, pesos 97,380 for raisins and 11,882 for wines.” (5)
Over the years, the winemaking persistence of the Cuyo people was echoed and spread in the ideas and projects of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who would promote the introduction of French strains and it would solve its historic distribution problem with the arrival of the railroad to Mendoza in 1885, which coincided with an exponential increase in demand in Buenos Aires and the Litoral due to the arrival of immigrants from countries that had wine as a key element of their diets. .
1. Alexander Caldcleugh, Travels in South America. Río de la Plata, 1821, Solar, Buenos Aires, 1943.
2. Proctor, op. cit., p. 44.
3. Cited by Díaz Araujo, Díaz Araujo, Edgardo A., Argentine viticulture – I. Its historical evolution and legal regime from the conquest to 1852, University of Mendoza – Editorial Idearium, Mendoza, 1989, page. 100.
5. Ibidem, p. 127, citing data from Juan Carlos Nicolau, Argentine Industry and Customs 1835-1854, Devenir, Buenos Aires, 1975, page. 166.
