Argentina

Argentina grows almost all of its wine in a narrow strip along the eastern foot of the Andes, in a desert. Rainfall in Mendoza is around 200 millimetres a year, so every vine is irrigated, historically by flooding channels fed by Andean snowmelt. The dryness is an advantage: fungal disease is rare, organic farming is straightforward, and the fruit arrives clean.

Altitude does the work that latitude does elsewhere. Vineyards run from about 600 metres up to 3,000 metres in Salta, which puts them among the highest in the world. Height brings a wide gap between day and night temperature, which lets the grapes ripen fully while holding acidity, and it brings strong ultraviolet light, which thickens skins and deepens colour and tannin.

Malbec arrived from Cahors in south west France in the mid nineteenth century and became something different here. In France it is firm and rustic; in Mendoza it is dark, plush and softer in tannin. The country's own quality shift came from moving malbec uphill, into the Uco Valley and Luján de Cuyo, where the wines are tighter and more mineral than the ripe style that first sold abroad.

The rest of the vineyard is more varied than the export shelf suggests. Bonarda is the second most planted red. Torrontés, a crossing of muscat of Alexandria and the criolla family, makes an intensely aromatic dry white in Salta. And the old pink criolla varieties, once dismissed as bulk material, are now being taken seriously for light, fresh reds.