Susana Balbo: The Queen of Torrontés Who Was Nearly a Physicist
In 1981, Susana Balbo became the first woman in Argentina to earn a university degree in oenology. She graduated cum laude — and then couldn't get a single winemaking job near her home in Mendoza, because no one would hire a woman to make wine. What she did next reshaped the entire country's wine industry.
Here's the twist most people don't know: Balbo never meant to make wine at all. She wanted to be a nuclear physicist. But the physics program meant leaving Mendoza, and her parents refused to let their daughter move away alone. So she stayed, enrolled in the one demanding science degree her city offered — oenology — and quietly made history by finishing first in a room full of men.
Shut out of Mendoza's cellars, she took the only job she was offered: 1,000 kilometres north, in the high desert of Cafayate, Salta, at the Michel Torino winery. It should have been exile. Instead it became her making.
In 1991 she returned to Mendoza on her own terms, and in 1999 she founded Susana Balbo Wines in Luján de Cuyo — the heart of Argentine Malbec country. It remains a family business: her son José (a UC Davis graduate) and daughter Ana now work alongside her.
She never stopped breaking rules. In 2013 she pioneered barrel-fermented Torrontés, proving a grape everyone drank young could actually age. She served three terms as president of Wines of Argentina — the years the country's exports exploded onto the world map. She was elected to Argentina's National Congress in 2015, and in 2017 was named Chair of the W20, the G20's working group on women's empowerment. Decanter later inducted her into its Hall of Fame.
“They told me a woman couldn't make wine. So I made the wine no one else understood.”— on turning Torrontés into Argentina's flagship white
The full-circle moment came this year. Balbo's restaurant, La VidA, at her SB Winemaker's House & Spa Suites, earned a Michelin star in 2026 — part of the wave that pushed Mendoza to nine of Argentina's fourteen stars. The woman no cellar would hire now runs one of the most decorated wine estates in the country.
If you want to taste what she built, start with a glass of good Torrontés — cold, floral, alive — and remember it was nearly never made at all. For more on the grape she rescued, see our Torrontés guide.