Criolla & País: the 500-year comeback

Every other grape in these guides arrived in Argentina as an immigrant with a French or Italian passport. The Criolla family got here first — almost five centuries ago — and then spent most of modern history being treated as an embarrassment. Today that story is being rewritten. The country's oldest vines are at the heart of one of the most exciting grassroots movements in South American wine, and the wines they make are unlike anything else on a list.

The grape that built South American wine

When Spanish missionaries and settlers crossed the Atlantic in the 16th century, they brought vine cuttings. The most important was a black grape known in Spain as Listán Prieto — and as it spread across the New World it picked up new names everywhere it landed: Mission in California, País in Chile, and Criolla Chica in Argentina (with some 45 other synonyms in between). It was the foundation on which all of South American wine was built, the dominant grape for roughly 300 years.

It is also, quietly, family royalty. Criolla Chica is a parent of Torrontés, Argentina's signature white — so the grape almost nobody orders is the ancestor of the grape everyone loves. The wider Criolla family is a sprawling clan that includes Criolla Grande, Cereza, Pedro Giménez, various Moscatels and the Torrontés varieties themselves. According to Argentina's agricultural institute, more than a third of the entire country is still planted with Criolla varieties.

From embarrassment to revival

So why has almost no one heard of it? Because for the better part of a century, Criolla was the grape of cheap bulk wine — high-yielding, pink-skinned, planted for volume and made into the jug wine that Argentines drank by the litre. As the country chased premium Malbec, Criolla became something to rip out, not celebrate.

Then a new generation of winemakers looked again at those scorned old vineyards — many of them genuinely ancient, 60, 70, 80 years old — and realised they were sitting on a treasure: low-yielding old vines, full of character, growing nowhere else on earth. Eastern Mendoza is the heartland of the revival, with important old-vine sites in San Juan and the Calchaquí Valley too. The pioneers — Sebastián Zuccardi's Cara Sur project in San Juan among the most prominent — chose to make heritage wines that look to Argentina's own past rather than to Bordeaux or California. That pride in a local, rooted identity is exactly what makes the movement so compelling.

The label that took 500 years to fix

Here is the detail that captures the whole saga. For most of its history, Criolla Chica was officially classified as a pink grape — which legally forced producers to bottle it as rosé (vino rosado), even when they were making a proper light red from it. Winemakers found their reds stuck on wine lists in the rosé section, unable to use the prestigious GI appellations reserved for “quality” wines.

That finally changed in 2024, when Argentina's National Viticulture Institute officially recognised Criolla Chica as a quality red grape — almost 500 years after it first arrived. It can now be bottled as a red and carry a GI on the label. A small bureaucratic line, an enormous symbolic moment.

The grape almost nobody orders is the ancestor of the grape everyone loves.

What it tastes like

This is the fun part: Criolla wines sit in a delicious grey zone between rosé and light red, and they are made for the modern taste for fresh, pale, low-intervention wines. Expect a pale, luminous colour, aromas of red berries — strawberry, raspberry, redcurrant, cranberry — with rose petal, citrus zest and a savoury, earthy, faintly chestnut note. On the palate they are light, juicy and vibrant, with bright acidity and, from the old-vine examples, a surprising grip of fine tannin. Many are made in concrete eggs with wild yeasts to keep them pure and unmanipulated.

You'll meet them in a few guises: dry Criolla rosés (often a field blend of Criolla Chica and Criolla Grande), the new wave of pale Criolla Chica “reds,” and even Pet Nat sparklers. They are some of the most refreshing, characterful and food-flexible wines Argentina makes — and usually a bargain.

How to drink it

Serve Criolla lightly chilled and treat it like the easygoing crowd-pleaser it is. It is brilliant with summer food: grilled shrimp and ceviche, fish tacos, charcuterie, soft cheeses, salads and Mediterranean dishes, or simply on its own on a warm afternoon. (For the exact temperature, see our guide to serving Argentine wine.) If your Argentine journey so far has been all big reds and high-altitude whites, Criolla is the soulful, slightly rebellious detour — the taste of where it all began, finally getting the respect it waited 500 years for.