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The grape everyone knows, somewhere new

Chardonnay needs no introduction. It is the great white grape of Burgundy, the backbone of Champagne, grown in nearly every wine country on earth. It is also famously a winemaker's grape — a relatively neutral canvas that takes its character from where it grows and how it is handled, from lean and steely to rich and buttery.

What makes Argentina's version worth seeking out is the where. The country has taken a familiar grape to an unfamiliar extreme — and the result is a Chardonnay unlike almost anywhere else.

The wine that started it: White Bones and White Stones

If you want one origin point for the revolution, it is Catena's Adrianna Vineyard in Gualtallary, planted in 1992. From it came two landmark Chardonnays — White Bones and White Stones, named for the different soils beneath them (one with fossilised calcium deposits, the other with stony alluvium). Made by Alejandro Vigil, widely regarded as one of the country's greatest winemakers, they showed the world that Argentina could produce serious, terroir-driven, age-worthy white wine — and gave every other producer a direction to aim for.

Today that vanguard runs along an arc of high-altitude sites across the Uco — Los Chacayes, San Pablo, Gualtallary, La Carrera — where Chardonnay is the queen of white grapes. Producers like Zuccardi, Rutini and Achaval Ferrer are now chasing single-vineyard whites of real precision, some of them deliberately made without malolactic fermentation to keep that knife-edge freshness.

The country quietly proving its mountains can make whites as serious as its reds.