Here's a little break from matters Australian. I was in Argentina in December 2008 for winework, and published a travel piece (about raindrops, clouds, mountains and horses) in the Financial Times in mid-March. This is a new version of it.

Notes from Upland

In Mendoza, you’ll spend as much time in the air as on the ground. Everyone reaching this oasis under the Argentinean Andes finds their gaze drawn upwards as if on fish hooks. There, in vast tracts of unconfined air, cloud battles are fought, mountains parade and retreat, and the sunlight cascades down onto vineyards planted and wineries constructed on more audacious a scale than anywhere else in the world.

This is the roof of the winegrowing world. There are vineyards in Argentina which lie 700 metres above the highest spot in the entire continent of Australia; the Mendozan average of 1000 metres or more is loftier than almost anywhere in France.

Desert raindropsNot that you’re necessarily aware of this when you’re there, since the vineyards are a flat step on a vast stairway. What lies below is lost in distant haze; it’s what lies above which is hypnotic.

On a clear early morning, the highest part of the Andes glimmers snowily above the plain of sediments, peak after peak, like some medieval dream of virtue. Broad Aconcagua, slope-shouldered Tupungato and the nearer, toothier Cerro del Plata are the leading players, yet there’s a cast of hundreds.

Mountains in the midheavenClear days are plentiful (Mendoza claims 320 days of sunshine a year); though puffy cumulus tends to crowd the peaks as the morning draws on. It was an unusually drizzly summer day, though, which gave me the view I will never forget.

As I tiptoed among the desert plants photographing them draped in a puzzle of raindrops, the clouds briefly parted in the midheaven to reveal snow-capped peaks, crisp-focussed and crazily close, appearing to float entirely free from the bonds of earth. Meteorological effects can easily seem metaphorical. I was still formulating some leaden lesson about dismissing the fantastic at our peril when they closed again, and my moment of magical realism was over.

Late morning cumulus often ripens, on high summer days here, into thunderous cumulo-nimbus by afternoon’s end. At the end of my stay, I returned to Buenos Aries on an early evening flight during which the pilot’s task was to steal cautiously through a vast forest of explosive and seductively beautiful water vapour. Gigantic anvil-headed stacks beckoned us, extruding popcorn cliffs, white lava flows, and slowly moving aortas of icing. A honeyed light was still seeping over the Andes from behind, giving the clouds an inner apricot glow. It was impossible to believe there was the force within these luscious confections to tear a plane to pieces. Down on earth, though, Mendozans have learned to fear the clouds. Every year, their golfball-sized hail stones shred thousands of vine leaves into green and brown tissue paper. Solar panels and windscreens are smashed; car bodywork takes an uninsurable pocking.

Perhaps the endless, importuning sky has something to do with it, but Mendoza has become the wine world’s greatest field of dreams over the last decade. The world’s rich have sought to outdo each other with breadth of vineyard plantings and wineries whose showy architecture often seems to incite Ozymandias-like hubris to overtake them. One attraction has been the freedom (rare in Europe) to plant any grape variety in any place; another has been the lure of absolute control which irrigated vines in a sunny oasis promise. But the third has been the slinky attraction of Mendoza’s dark, vivacious Malbec-based wines: evidently a new world original, and perhaps the greatest variety-plus-location double act to emerge on the world stage since New Zealand brought us Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough.

Decero cloudsTasting at wineries like O.Fournier’s spaceship, the giant’s estancia at Decero, Catena‘s Mayan pyramid or Monteviejo’s sky ramp at Clos de los Siete, shouldn’t be missed; many wineries, too, now offer restaurant facilities which promise a little more than the endless (if remorselessly good) beef you will be served elsewhere. The best winery restaurants include O.Fournier, Ruca Malen and Andeluna. Booking first is essential, not least because the security at winery entrances is disconcertingly rigorous.

Sooner or later, of course, you’ll want to go higher. Aconcagua is the highest mountain outside Asia; that, plus the fact that it is a relatively simple, non-technical scramble to the top, makes it attractive enough for thousands to try it every year (altitude sickness is the main reason for failure). Permits to climb the peak are issued in Mendoza. Committed climbers, by contrast, are said to prefer Tupungato, with its greater technical challenges. All I managed to scramble up, by contrast, was a little hill called Mirador in the hot, snowless Precordillera.

I had assumed these hills were nothing but desert scrub from below, but they turned out to be a chain of unfenced livestock farms where horses, cows and goats roamed freely, grazing coirón grass and other desert plants. My guide Markos Gattas claimed there was a condor’s nest on top of a nearby hill; huge hares the size of suitcases came bowling down the hill, goat-startled; the farmer’s main anxiety, Markos told me, was pumas, one of which can kill twenty horses a day during hunting tuition of their young.

Being, lightlyThe dryness of the heat made climbing relatively easy. The vegetation, which had seemed drearily dun from a distance, became silver, orange, yellow and dark green close up, the scarcity of water giving the plants an intrinsic finesse. As Markos and I rummaged among their hauntingly scented leaves, I was touched to find the familiarity of wild thyme, parched into pungency by the sun just as you’ll find it on Crete.

Later, the walk over, Markos brewed us a gourd of maté tea which we shared with gloomy, football-loving Hannibal who had driven us to the farm. As the three of us sipped the hot, bitter, sugar-sweetened holly juices through a lip-burning metal straw, a colt strolled down towards us, rolled onto its back, and took a dust bath. No one spoke. The wind blew; the birds called; the sun shone. Two other colts arrived, and the first one rose and shook itself. They then gently pranced, and pawed each other’s necks, and chafed each other in acts of the calmest play I have ever seen. When I think of Argentina now, it is not tango or Malbec or Maradona which first comes to mind, but that quiet moment up in the Mendoza hills when three horses gave three humans a lesson in the lightness of being.