FOWines Wins Gold at Mendoza's 2026 Wine Tourism Awards
FOWines, a one-person boutique estate in San Rafael, has won gold in the Small Wineries category at Mendoza's official Best of Wine Tourism 2026 awards — beating out far larger, better-known producers. It's the clearest sign yet that the province's tourism story is shifting from big industrial bodegas toward small, personal ones.
The award, run under the international Great Wine Capitals network, recognizes wineries across categories like architecture, sustainability and visitor experience. FOWines' win in the small-producer category went to a project built almost entirely around one person: winemaker Fabricio Orlando, a San Rafael native who trained at established names including Rutini Wines and Pulenta Estate before returning south to build something of his own.
San Rafael sits roughly 230 km south of Mendoza city — further out than the Uco Valley circuit most first-time visitors stick to, and rarely mentioned in the standard best-wineries-in-Mendoza lists. That's part of the point: boutique estates like FOWines offer the kind of direct, unhurried conversation with the person who actually made the wine that's harder to get at the bigger, bus-tour-friendly bodegas closer to the city.
For most visitors on a standard trip, the practical move is still to anchor a visit around the well-established wineries covered in our Mendoza wineries guide, then use any extra days to go further afield. If you're mapping out logistics from the capital, our Buenos Aires to Mendoza guide covers flights, buses and timing.
We'll be watching whether San Rafael and other southern Mendoza producers start showing up more often in wine-tour itineraries over the next year — it fits a pattern we're seeing across the region, from Mendoza's broader wine map to the smaller producers profiled elsewhere on this site.