Cooperativa San Carlos Sud

We recently got a shipment of delicious red wines from the Uco Valley (Valle de Uco) region of Mendoza, Argentina. I'm not sure if you've heard of the Uco Valley or even Mendoza for that matter. I hadn't, and while I found a lot of information about Mendoza on the internet, I found very little about the Uco Valley. The Uco Valley, it turns out, is emerging as one of the prime areas in Mendoza for premium quality wines. I write more about the region here.

The wines, a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Malbec are both from a cooperative vineyard that was formed in the 1980's and is composed of 51 small and medium vineyard producers. I thought this was quite an interesting story for a wine as I've never heard of a cooperative vineyard before.

The cooperative, called San Carlos Sud, works with the producers from the beginning, consulting on the pruning techniques, vineyard management and harvesting dates.  The vineyards are oriented towards specific product lines, based on historical results.  However, the final determination is made in the winery, once the wines have finished fermenting, so that wines originally oriented towards a varietal line have a chance to be upgraded to the reserve line, and vice-versa.  The members of the cooperative share in the winery´s profits, but also receive a percentage of the sale price of their wines.  Since the sale price is closely related to the the quality level of the wines, the producers have a strong incentive to produce high-quality grapes.  While the winery is quite large, the average fermenting tank size is quite small, permitting the winery to ferment individual producers grapes, which thus makes it possible to implement the quality-based reward system so fundamental to keeping good quality.

San Carlos Sud has a website, but it's in Spanish. Fortunately, I was able to use a translation plugin that translated the Spanish into English. Isn't the internet great? On the homepage is a line of a poem, which I absolutely fell in love with (remember this is a loose translation):

The wine, like love,

you have to drink from in sips,

because the two palls

if you drink otherwise

Alfredo Bufano

Comments

[Dino]

The Uco Valley is the bast wine place of Argentina.