Italy in the glass

Sit down at any long table in Mendoza on a Sunday afternoon and you will see a small miracle of geography. There is asado, of course, but there is also pasta — tallarines, ravioles, ñoquis. There is a fierce coffee culture. There is wine in carafes, drunk all afternoon. The architecture in town is faintly Italian; the surnames around the table are Italian; even the vineyards out the window are trained on the tall parral pergolas of northern Italy. Argentina drinks like Argentina, but a closer look reveals: it drinks like Italy too. This is the quiet half of the Argentine wine story, the half almost no label tells you about — and you can taste it in every glass.

A country built by immigrants

Argentina's modern character was forged in one of the largest migrations in human history. Between 1853 and 1910, roughly seven million European immigrants poured into the country through the port of Buenos Aires, drawn by progressive immigration policies and the promise of land. The Italians made up the largest single share — so much so that around 60% of Argentines today claim some Italian heritage, one of the biggest Italian diasporas in the world.

Many of those Italians came from the north: Piedmont, Lombardy, the Veneto, Valle d'Aosta — wine country at home. And while most settled in Buenos Aires or the Pampas, a meaningful number kept going west, all the way to Mendoza, where in 1885 a brand-new railway connected the foothills of the Andes to the capital. The vines were already there, planted by Spanish settlers centuries before. What arrived with the immigrants was the know-how.

What the Italians brought to the bodega

This is where the story gets concrete, because the Italians didn't just provide labor — they brought a Europe-tested wine culture into a country that had been making rough, colonial table wine for centuries. Their influence reshaped the industry in a few specific, lasting ways.

They brought professional winemaking. Northern Italians knew how to grow, ferment, blend and bottle wine properly. They worked as growers, oenologists, mechanics, builders and businesspeople — and they staffed the new generation of bodegas that built modern Mendoza.

They brought grape varieties. Most famously Bonarda, the country's second most planted red, was carried across by Italian immigrants in the late 19th century (under that confusing name, even though DNA testing has since revealed the grape is actually France's Douce Noir of Savoie — close enough to northern Italy to ride along with them).

They brought a system of training the vines. That tall, overhead, leafy “green roof” you see in older Mendoza vineyards — the parral or pergola — is essentially the pergola trentina of northern Italy. It shades the grapes from intense Andean sunlight in a way that flat European trellis systems do not, and it remains one of the most distinctive visual signatures of Argentine viticulture. A wine geek can spot the Italian influence from the highway.

They built the dynasties. The most famous Argentine wine family — the Catenas — is itself Italian. Nicola Catena left Belforte del Chienti, in Italy's Marche, in 1898 and settled in Mendoza, founding a small winery in 1902. Four generations later, his great-granddaughter Laura Catena runs what is widely considered Argentina's most influential wine estate, and the story of how Malbec was saved in the 1990s is, at its heart, an Italian-Argentine story.

What they brought to the table

The wine, though, is only half of it. The way Argentines drink is also Italian.

The famous Argentine asado may be a New World institution, but the meal around it is profoundly Italian. Pasta is everywhere: tallarines (fettuccine), ravioles (ravioli), ñoquis (gnocchi). One of the country's most charming traditions, Ñoquis del 29, sees families serving gnocchi on the 29th of every month, with a banknote tucked under the plate for good luck — a custom of pure Italian folklore, fully Argentinized. The breaded milanesa steak is a direct descendant of Milan's cotoletta. Aperitivo — the pre-dinner drink — is a habit Italians brought and Argentines embraced. The coffee culture of Buenos Aires, Mendoza and the rest is an Italian inheritance.

And there is something subtler still. Italians don't drink wine to evaluate it; they drink it with food, easily, as part of life. That attitude — wine as table companion, not status object — is very Argentine. It is one of the most likable things about drinking wine in this country, and it is straight out of Piedmont.

How to taste it

You can hear all of this on a Sunday afternoon in Mendoza, but you can also taste it in three specific glasses.

• A Bonarda with pasta or pizza is the most literal example — the grape Italian immigrants brought and the food they popularized, in deliberate conversation.
• A juicy, friendly young Malbec drunk casually with grilled meat is the Italian attitude toward wine — generous, unfussy, made for the table — even though the grape itself is French.
• And an iconic Catena Zapata Malbec, the pinnacle of Argentine fine wine, is in family terms an Italian wine. The dynasty that built it began in a small village in Marche.

A culture in superposition

The most accurate way to describe Argentine wine, in the end, is that it is in superposition — French in its vines, Spanish in its language and oldest grapes, Argentine in its mountains and sun, and Italian in its hands, its tables and its temperament. The genius of the country was not to copy any one of these — it was to let them all live together in the same glass. So next time you pour an Argentine red, raise it once for the Andes, and once for the boat from Genoa. Both are in there.

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