Carrie Dann writes Carrie Dann is a wine lover and veteran political journalist in Washington D.C. She is currently pursuing WSET II and considering a transition to a writing career outside of politics.
Malbec, Young
They certainly hadn’t been exaggerating about the scenery.
The view from the rental car window, as we hurtled towards the Uco Valley from the city of Mendoza, was of mountaintops poking through cotton-ball clouds, jaggedly, as if they were straining to peer at the endless rows of vines below.
I should have been gasping at the vistas as we twisted through each Instagram-perfect glimpse at a wine-lover’s paradise. Instead, I was staring at the ceiling of the rental car, mentally replaying the fight I’d had days before with my husband of three years. Who happened to be the one driving, his own face set in a grimace that made me sure he was living his own rerun of the same fight.
The substance of the argument has since faded to a dull memory. Minor, really, but suffice to say it had been our first really big fight. The kind that makes a fairly newly-married person red-eyed and raw-throated, distracted, short-tempered, wondering if this thing was actually built to last.
So when our rental pulled into Bodega La Azul, my thoughts had little to do with the vines’ legacy as the oldest in the valley, or the decades of dedication it had taken to create such lushness here in the shadow of the Cordón del Plata – what was once a rocky and foreboding plain. I wasn’t even thinking about the Malbec I was ostensibly there to drink. I was mostly preoccupied with whether I had succeeded in my vengeful attempts to look maximally cute.
But as we stepped out of the car, a glamorous older Argentine woman materialized in the doorway of La Finca. She half-jogged towards us, already bearing the expression of a beloved long-lost aunt who was fully planning to leave us a very expensive credenza in her will.
She was also bearing wine.
Her name was Shirley, we discovered. The founder of the winery, the daughter of the legendary farmer who had first planted here, and hostess of the guesthouse where we would be staying. “But first, you must have this,” she said, thrusting towards us two very full glasses of wine in a color I had never seen before.
It was purple. Not in a velvety, elegant, subtle way. This wine glowed nearly neon. The color of grape Fanta. A clown wig. The eggplant emoji.
“Malbec, young. Too young, really” she said, richly accented. “We give this only to our guests, so they will appreciate the FRUIT.”
She gestured grandly toward the vines, which I actually noticed now. “You must start with good fruit,” Shirley continued. “Then good choices. Then good time. But the start, it is good fruit.”
She suggested that my husband and I take a quiet stroll among the vines – the sun was setting, after all – and drink our wine, which in the golden light looked increasingly like a sugary beverage one might hesitate to give their kid before bedtime.
She disappeared, leaving it to us. I wished she was my long-lost aunt. She certainly seemed to know something was up – the kind of thing that only a walk in a vineyard at sunset would fix.
And here’s the thing. This wine – it was wine, right? – was so fresh, so recent, so urgent. It stained our teeth, stamped “I WAS HERE” on our faces. It was a juice box of blackberries and red plums and Jolly Rancher. It asked nothing of us except to appreciate its newness, to live in the moment of what it was, rather than what it would become.
We walked. We talked it out. We giggled and licked our purple lips.
Was this wine… good? It didn’t matter. Shirley had been right.
In spite of – no, because of - the rocks in the soil and the toil to irrigate it, the fruit was good.
We’d have to make good choices. Mostly, we’d need time. But the fruit was good, and rich, and bursting with the joy of being young. Which meant that the aging would be joyful too.
We’ll drink a bottle from Shirley on our tenth anniversary this August. I’ll tell you how it is.
