Summer 2007 was significant: it was the summer during which I first travelled to Argentina, my future home, and when I met Clare, my future wife.
It was also a summer of relative freedom: I was between jobs at the time and had decided to travel through South America. I wasn’t a wine buff but I’d visited vineyards on trips to Australia and South Africa and I wanted to do so on this continent, too. I knew the place to learn more about wine was South America’s wine capital: Mendoza in Argentina.
I planned to undertake a number of winery tours but it didn’t quite work out like that: on my first night there I contracted a particularly violent bout of food poisoning. Instead, I spent my time in the city subsisting on bottled water and cheese toasties. So long, romanticism.
But Mendoza stayed on my mind. Back in England, I read an article about the city written by wine critic Tim Atkin. Argentina, he said, and Mendoza in particular, was becoming an increasingly popular destination for Britons looking to invest in vineyards and produce their own wine. I hadn’t ever considered it. Now I was interested. I contacted Michael Evans, one of the founders of The Vines of Mendoza, a company that manages and sells vineyards in the region to private buyers. The American-born businessman talked me through the company’s vision and the opportunities available to foreign investors. I’d started something.
There was a running joke that I’d discover I’d purchased not a thriving vineyard but a graffiti-pasted car park in an urban no-man’s land
And I was intrigued. Remember, in 2007 people had money. There was optimism in the air. About two weeks after I’d contacted Evans I received a dozen bottles of Argentine wine in the post. Eight weeks later I signed the contract to buy three acres of what was still desert in Mendoza’s Uco Valley.
The purchase was spontaneous but I’d quibble that it was naive. I employed a lawyer to manage the purchase, and received positive results from the soil samples I’d taken from the plot to determine its suitability for growing vines. And honestly, the spontaneity and slight recklessness was part of the appeal. It was glamorous and had a sense of adventure.
Many friends, however, were less enthusiastic. I was warned frequently and almost condescendingly that I could be handing over cash to dodgy Argentine bandits rather than legitimate businessmen. There was a running joke that I’d discover I’d purchased not a thriving vineyard but a graffiti-pasted car park in an urban no-man’s land. But there was a subtle but tangible sense of excitement too. People asked about my progress constantly; friends wanted to try the product.
It wasn’t until 2009 that Clare and I visited the vineyard for ourselves. We were very optimistic: we’d been sent an album of enticing pictures of our land, lush with vineyards and dramatically framed by the Andes, and our journey to our plot in the Uco Valley, about 60 miles south of Mendoza City, was spectacular. Our excitement only increased as we passed a succession of perfectly manicured vineyards with stately driveways and handsome winery buildings. An appreciation of wine was everywhere, as were grand testaments to its profitability.
But that enthusiasm vanished when we arrived at the nondescript entrance to our plot. Instead of sweeping driveways and vast estates, we encountered an overgrown wilderness. The mesmerising vistas we’d admired in photos were nowhere in evidence. I felt sick. We’d privately dismissed friends’ concerns as petty jealousy. We suddenly felt very foolish.
Then, we reached what seemed like a small ridge in the road. On the far side, a sheer drop swept down to a valley, hundreds of acres flush with vines: the panoramas we’d seen in those pictures over the last two years.
That first evening at the vineyard we sat by the pond, drank some wine, had an asado (barbeque) and watched the changing colours of the vines as the sun set behind the mountains. The stars were so much clearer than back home in England.
In November 2011, seduced by the entrepreneurial spirit of the Argentine dream, we left our jobs and flew out to Mendoza. We committed to six months initially, with a long-term plan to stay for two years and set up a business there if things went well.
Early on, we decided to devote our vineyard exclusively to Malbec. We imagined a fruit-forward, easy drinking wine for our first vintage. It was symbolic of easing ourselves into the experience, segueing gradually into a new life that on paper might resemble a mid-life crisis. Our very first harvest took place in April 2011, following which the grapes were macerated and fermented in stainless steel tanks for 20 days before being left in tank for six months. They were then moved to third-use French oak barrels for six months prior to bottling. Making wine is certainly a game of patience. Finally, in December 2011, we got to taste our wine for the first time.
I took a large sip. The taste was complemented with the heady rush of relief: it tasted like wine! We could put in front of someone and declare, “We made this”
When I was passed the glass, I swirled it and smelled it for at least five minutes. After four years of waiting, of suffering jokes from friends (“When will that cooking wine be ready?”), I really, desperately, wanted to like it. The smells were familiar and strong – plummy, ripe fruits – and the colour dark and inky. I took a large sip. The taste was complemented with the heady rush of relief: it tasted like wine! We could put in front of someone and declare, “We made this.”
We named our wine Cupari – Latin for barrel-maker, or cooper – because of the links to the barrel-making history of my home town, Burton-on-Trent. We only produced 600 bottles of Cupari that first year, a relatively tiny yield, and shipped these back to the UK to sell to our family and friends.
After two months in Mendoza, however, we started to contact wineries to set up meetings to see whether they would be interested in exporting to the UK. This led to ten fantastic weeks touring family-run boutique wineries, tasting hundreds of excellent wines and enjoying some amazing hospitality. While all those wineries were already exporting to the US and Brazil, the UK was quite a different proposition. The dominance of the supermarkets, and the omnipresence of discounting, were grounds for suspicion about whether it would be worth their while to try and break into this new market; but we’ve since convinced four different wineries to join us. The faith in our fledgling start-up is a great responsibility, but it’s also hugely gratifying: we doubted we’d secure the faith of our Argentine suppliers.
The result is Cupari Wines, established in 2012, which now imports 22 different Argentine wines to the UK (including what remains of our own label Cupari Malbec 2011). In Argentina our wineries are seen as producers of some of the best boutique wines. We sell the wines on our website and also direct to restaurants in London and independent wine shops in the South East. It now looks like I’ll be living in some version of the summer of 2007 for the rest of my life. C