Cheval des Andes

The estate was born in 1999 from an agreement between Château Cheval Blanc, of Saint-Émilion, and Terrazas de los Andes. The reason for the journey was very specific: Pierre Lurton, president of Cheval Blanc, was looking for ungrafted Malbec.

That explains everything else. Phylloxera wiped out French Malbec in the 1860s, and what was replanted afterwards was grafted onto American rootstock. Argentina kept its own material as it was, on its own roots, so Lurton went to the one place where Malbec from before that break still stood.

He found it at Las Compuertas, in Luján de Cuyo, a vineyard planted in 1929. Today the estate covers forty-seven hectares split between those parcels and smaller holdings in Paraje Altamira, in the Uco Valley.