300 Acres at the Edge of the World
In Chubut, deep in Argentine Patagonia, vineyards are scattered between the Andes and the Atlantic across one of Argentina's smallest and most challenging wine regions. Production is tiny, the wines are increasingly well travelled, and finding one is still part of the adventure.
By Sergio Landoni, Territory-Based Sommelier
A Spanish-language article exploring the same territory from a different editorial perspective is available at Vinos de Chubut: cuando producir poco puede significar mucho.
Chubut has 122.4 hectares of vineyards. For readers more familiar with acres, that is about 302 acres, not much more than a single wine estate in many parts of the world. Here, however, those 302 acres represent the vineyards of an entire Argentine province.
They are scattered across a vast stretch of Patagonia between roughly 42° and 46° south, from valleys close to the Chilean border to the shores of the South Atlantic. Pinot Noir accounts for 46.2 hectares, more than a third of the total, alongside Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Semillón, Cabernet Franc, Merlot and a handful of other varieties.
This is Argentina, but it bears little resemblance to the Argentina most international wine drinkers know. Mendoza built much of its identity around altitude. In Chubut, latitude becomes the defining geographical fact. Some vineyards sit only a few hundred meters above sea level, yet growers contend with frost, persistent wind, short seasons and enormous distances.
I came to understand this story through people and bottles before I understood it through statistics. One of those people was Darío González Maldonado.
Learning to forget Mendoza
An agronomist and winemaker from San Juan, Darío arrived in El Hoyo at the beginning of the 2000s to work with Patagonian Wines, part of the first commercial chapter of Chubut wine. He initially thought Patagonia would be temporary.
“I came for five years and stayed for the rest of my life,” he later recalled.
The harder part was changing the assumptions people brought with them. Darío remembers growers arriving with what he calls “the Mendoza manual,” planting Malbec simply because that was what Argentine wine was supposed to look like.
In some of these southern sites, Malbec would not ripen properly. Even Pinot Noir could struggle in particular locations, leading Darío to suggest sparkling wine instead, as happened with Entre Senderos in Trevelin.
When I invited him to Vino a la Montaña, the Patagonian wine fair we held in San Martín de los Andes in 2025, that history helped me connect stories I had been encountering separately. Chubut had not developed by simply taking an established Argentine wine model and moving it farther south. Much of the progress came from discovering which parts of that model had to be abandoned.
The process can be surprisingly informal. A few rows planted beside a house become an experiment. Someone finds old vines and wonders what they might produce. A winemaker helps with a first harvest. Plant material and experience move between growers, and a failed vintage becomes information for the next one.
In Lago Puelo, old white grapevines planted years earlier by Antonella Brozzoni's father eventually became interesting when Darío suggested making wine from them. Stories like this appear repeatedly across Chubut, where the human network is sometimes easier to follow than the wine map itself.
At the limit of what is possible
Trevelin provides perhaps the clearest example.
Near 43° south and only a few miles from Chile, the landscape is green, mountainous and almost unexpected for anyone whose mental picture of Argentine wine begins in Mendoza. Casa Yagüe sits at about 330 meters above sea level, close to the Futaleufú River and surrounded by mountains rising above 2,000 meters.
Marcelo Yagüe has a simple description for the place: “Our vineyards are at the limit of what is possible.”
At only about 330 meters above sea level, altitude is hardly the defining challenge. Frost can occur even during summer, while the southern growing season brings exceptionally long daylight hours.
At Viñas del Nant y Fall, frost protection has become part of vineyard life. When temperatures fall, overhead sprinklers cover the vines with water. Ice forms around the plant tissue while the system continues operating, helping protect the vines from temperatures that might otherwise destroy the crop.
The Rodríguez family arrived there from Mar del Plata in December 2009. Before wine came years of recovering land heavily invaded by wild rose. Their first harvest arrived in April 2016.
Other vineyards appeared around the valley: Casa Yagüe, Contra Corriente, Baruk, Entre Senderos, Callejón del Viento and smaller projects testing varieties and accumulating experience. In 2020, Trevelin became Chubut's first legally recognized Geographical Indication.
The European wine world has a term, heroic viticulture, usually associated with vineyards where steep slopes, altitude or other physical conditions make farming exceptionally difficult. Chubut does not formally belong to that classification, and its challenges are different from the terraces normally associated with it. Still, repeated frost, long nights protecting vines, wind and the climatic uncertainty of growing grapes this far south give the expression a certain resonance here.
Casa Yagüe's wines have since received recognition from critics including Patricio Tapia and Tim Atkin. The more interesting part of the story is that only a decade earlier, growers in this valley were still working out which varieties could reliably survive and ripen.
From forest to steppe
Leaving the Andean valleys and driving east changes the landscape quickly. Forest gives way to open country, the air becomes drier and the distances between places grow.
Gualjaina was one of the places that made me look differently at Chubut.
Daniel Fermani and Laura Galdámez developed Huancache there, initially around hospitality and the landscape before adding vines, a small winery and cellar. I remember their Chardonnay particularly well for a very uncomplicated reason: I wanted another glass.
That experience also reinforced something worth keeping in mind when discussing small or extreme wine regions. Scarcity can make a bottle interesting, but it cannot make the wine good.
Nearby, Mariano Miretti and Alejandra González learned how unforgiving the process could be. Their first serious attempt involved around 2,000 Pinot Noir vines. It failed. The site needed protection from wind and frost, and there was little local experience to indicate what should be done differently.
They tried again.
With advice from Darío González Maldonado, a few hundred Chardonnay vines became part of the next experiment. Cielos de Gualjaina eventually developed from those trials into a small family winery working with tiny vinifications, a manual wooden press and, among other vessels, stoneware amphorae made with materials from Chubut.
Some releases have numbered only a few hundred bottles. Those quantities were not invented as a scarcity strategy. They were simply how much wine there was.
Elsewhere across the central plateau, growers have dealt with frost, wind, hares, limited infrastructure, electricity and the cost of moving people, grapes and equipment across considerable distances. Successful vintages sit alongside failed plantings and experiments that never became commercial wines. In a region this young, failure is part of the information being accumulated.
One of eighteen
My own discovery of Chubut has often happened through encounters like these rather than through an organized tour of its wineries.
At Vinos & Negocios in Buenos Aires, I tasted an experimental sparkling Merlot made by Mónica Puente of Casa Redonda, in the Lago Puelo area. Only 18 bottles had been produced, and I happened to taste one of them.
It was an experiment rather than a commercial proposition, but it said something about the stage Chubut is going through. Producers are not merely refining a model inherited from previous generations. In many places they are still discovering what that model might be.
There have been experiments with traditional-method sparkling wines, old vines, different varieties and unusual vessels. Darío himself has moved through projects involving wine, cider, raspberries and even an experimental sparkling drink made from tulip petals.
Some ideas will become businesses and others will remain a few bottles shared among curious people. Both belong to the history of a region still testing its possibilities.
At 45°33' south, the scale changes
Continue south to Sarmiento and the numbers suddenly look very different.
On the shores of Lake Musters, Otronia farms 50 hectares of organic vineyards at 45°33' south and only 258 meters above sea level. Planting began in 2010 with varieties including Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Merlot and Malbec. Permanent winds, cold and soils formed through lacustrine, fluvial, alluvial and aeolian processes define a landscape far removed from Trevelin.
Fifty hectares would hardly constitute an enormous operation elsewhere in Argentina. In Chubut, one project represents roughly two-fifths of the province's vineyard area.
Otronia is important to this story precisely because it disrupts the romantic version of it. Chubut is not interesting simply because families make tiny quantities of wine by hand. Here there is substantial investment, technical infrastructure, organic vineyards and an international commercial strategy. The wines travel and have accumulated recognition outside Patagonia.
For one grower, viability may mean selling a few hundred bottles directly to visitors; for Otronia, it means reaching international markets from a 50-hectare organic vineyard. The circumstances are different, but both have to find value in a place where producing wine is inherently difficult and expensive.
When the vineyards reach the Atlantic
Continue east and Chubut has one more surprise.
At Bahía Bustamante, vines have been planted practically beside the South Atlantic. Pinot Noir and Semillón were part of the early experiments, with Albariño joining later.
By then, the green valleys around Trevelin seem to belong to another wine region. The international wine world often uses Patagonia as though it described a single terroir, but Chubut alone makes that difficult.
Vineyards appear near Andean forests and rivers, across dry steppe, beside Lake Musters at 45° south and close to the Atlantic Ocean. The distances are enormous, the climates differ and the projects range from a few rows of vines to Otronia's 50 hectares.
What connects them is less a uniform style of wine than the experience of working near the geographical and economic margins of Argentine viticulture. Chubut is better understood as a mosaic of small wine territories, many of them still developing their own identity.
What can 300 acres become?
Chubut's 122.4 hectares represent little more than 0.06% of Argentina's vineyard area. Conventional volume economics are therefore difficult for much of the province.
Wine has instead begun to intersect naturally with hospitality, restaurants, direct sales and Patagonia's food culture. Lamb, trout, mushrooms, berries, cheeses and Atlantic seafood share the territory with Welsh culinary traditions and products from the Andes, steppe and coast.
For a grower with only a few hundred bottles, selling wine to someone who has travelled to the vineyard is very different from competing on price in conventional retail. A small allocation reaching the right restaurant, sommelier or specialist importer can have a similar effect.
Formal recognition has followed. Trevelin received its Geographical Indication in 2020, followed by Sarmiento and El Hoyo in 2023. Those names are beginning to provide geographical precision to wines that once disappeared almost entirely beneath the much broader word Patagonia.
Small production alone does not create value. Chubut has successful vineyards and failed ones, good wines and experiments, substantial investment and families tending a few rows of vines. What makes the province particularly interesting today is that all of those things are happening at the same time. The region is still young enough to watch it learn.
These bottles travel
More than twenty-five years have passed since those early commercial experiences around El Hoyo, yet the entire province still has only about 300 acres of vines.
Somewhere in Chubut, another grower is probably planting a few hundred vines, testing a variety or waiting to see what survives the next frost. Meanwhile, some of the bottles already being produced are moving in the opposite direction.
They leave Patagonia in small quantities and appear in export markets, restaurants, specialist wine shops and tastings thousands of miles from the vineyards where they were grown. Considering how little wine Chubut produces, encountering one abroad can still feel improbable.
So if one day you find a wine from Chubut on a list in New York, London, San Francisco, Toronto or somewhere neither the grower nor I could have predicted, try it.
There probably aren't many bottles like it.
Further reading
- Understanding Patagonia Through Its Wines
- Neuquén's Pinot Noir: Patagonia's Emerging Expression of Elegance
- Neuquén Wine Regions in Argentine Patagonia
- Vinos de Chubut: cuando producir poco puede significar mucho
- Back to the Journal
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