Today
The other half of the founding story is the immigrants. Argentina's open-borders policy in the late 19th century brought a tide of Italian and Spanish families to Mendoza — roughly six million Italians and Spaniards crossed in those decades, looking for a better life. Many settled along the eastern foothills of the Andes and went into wine.
Among them, in 1898, was one Nicola Catena, who had left the village of Belforte del Chienti in Italy's Marche region. He arrived in Mendoza just fourteen years after the city had been linked by rail to Buenos Aires, and in 1902 he founded a small winery. He could not have known he was planting the seed of what would become the most influential wine estate in South America. The family — Domingo Catena, then Nicolás Catena Zapata, then his daughter Laura Catena — would carry that small business across four generations and, eventually, change Argentine wine forever.
