Welcome to The Wiggin Sessions. Surviving and thriving in the post pandemic world. It's not really true with the delta variant. But today it's more about the thriving side, because we're talking about wine. Something that's dear to all of our hearts.

I have with me Will Bonner, founder of America's only private wine partnership, the Bonner Private Wine Partnership, and Diego Samper who is a full time wine explorer, and working with Will on the Bonner Private Wines. Welcome, gentlemen.

Yeah. I could say a little bit about it. It's called phylloxera and it's an aphid that attacks wine grapes, and it was brought over from indigenous to the new world, indigenous to California. And a botanist brought clippings over to Europe that unbeknownst to them had this phylloxera aphid on it, which then proceeded to devour the European grapes, which weren't resistant to it.

What we've been finding in our work is that there were a number of areas, aside from California, that were not affected and also resistant to this phylloxera. And one of those places, and it happens to be because of the soil conditions in some cases, and that's the case in Northern Argentina where we source our Malbec from.

And also on some Mediterranean islands such as Sardinia. We source some wines from there that are also pre phylloxera, original European grapes. It was definitely a very pivotal moment in wine history. Do you have anything to add to that, Diego?

Yeah. And I also think Chile has a little bit of that with Carbonero when they always say, "We lost all our Carbonero and everything." And then Chile comes up like, "We have it. We have a little bit of that left."

It's that part of the transition of the old world accepting the new world, because they had no other root in terms of wine making. We collaborate with each other and we will make better wines from now on.

But before that it was like, "We cannot take the new world wines. They are not at the level of our European wines." Specifically for the French. It was a moment of being humble and we started to cooperate with each other.

I don't think they were affected to phylloxera, but they were also a late type of country to start producing wines. Penfolds is probably the biggest wine producer in there, starting around the 50s, 60s. And it was just a different change of how to make wines.

And again, they didn't have any credibility in the position. When they came into the world, especially Penfolds with their Cask 52 I think it is the name of their wine. It's one of the most chased types of labels you can try to find in Australia.

I don't think they were directly affected, but they definitely were a late bloomer in the wine industry. But they have lots of fields producing at the moment.

Argentina was relatively late, and I do want to get to Argentina since we're talking about Malbec, which happens to be one of my favorites.

They're relatively late, but I believe it was the Mondavi family that introduced Malbec to Argentina. And they took the grape from the Burgundy Valley, and it did okay there but it was kind of sour, and it thrived in the higher altitudes of Argentina. That's the way I understand it.

Malbec loves the high altitude, which is a development that was discovered by chance. Malbec is indigenous to south central France, and it was being produced by the Gauls. And the Romans came in and they tried their grapes that they brought with them, which didn't do very well in this area of France, around Cahors where they produce Malbec today.

The Romans found out from the Celts, from the local Gauls that this grape does well in this area. And so they started planting it everywhere.

What's really interesting is just the track, the course of wine growing through the evolution of civilizations. It came from the Caucasus region originally 10,000 years ago, and then came down through Mesopotamia, through Lebanon and Syria into Babylon.

And then ultimately to Egypt, and then from Egypt to Greece, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to the French, and eventually to the English who went around. The English and the Spanish went around in the Americas planting grapes everywhere.

And it wasn't until much later until they got to California that they actually found a region that could grow grapes relatively well. It's amazing what a new discovery it was, and then watching this course of wine follow the development of civilizations.

But one of the biggest, I don't know, examples of this that I find interesting is when Noah's ark landed on Mount Ararat. The first thing he did, the first thing to reestablish civilization, was to plant a vineyard and grow grapes, and drink wine and get drunk and pass out. He knew man was reestablished.

The order was established. I think then the way of what Will was saying about how grapes have been spread, and you were asking specifically about Malbec across the world.

Argentina is very particular because it had lots of migration. It had Italian migration, it had Spanish migration, and then you had the religious migration from the Spanish coming from the north, through all the Inca Valleys.

And then they found in there one of the conditions that is perfect for growing grapes, and it was irrigation from all these civilizations previous to the Spaniards. They actually already had pretty much the crops set up for them to be able to get their wine for their mass, or whatever they were doing with it at the moment.

But it was one of the reasons Malbec was getting into Argentina, thanks to the priests. And then we're connected directly to one of the winemakers we work together with, which is the family that goes how many generations? Maybe five or six generations of wine making.

I think is the woman who brought some grapevines from France and planted them. She was a miner. She was mining. I don't know what she did exactly.

In the north of Argentina, which is not well known. People think wine making started in Mendosa in the south, but it really didn't. First it was in the north of Argentina.

And on the same tract of land where the first winery in Argentina was founded, is where my family's cattle ranch is and where we discovered this wine ourselves. It's on the same piece of land, and it's where we make wine with the same founding family in the same area.

And so these are grapes grown at over 8,000 feet and elevation, so the Malbec is able to produce a very thick skin to protect itself from the extreme altitude conditions. And it's in the skin that it develops these very rich cannons and resveratrol and flavonoids that are so good for you.

It's these grapes clinging to the edge of survival, and their ability to produce this thick skin. And these grapes tend to be very small when you pick them, and it also produces a very low yield at really high elevations, relative to lower elevations.

Everything converges in a perfect balance of survival to make this grape, and it's very unusual. It's an unusual thing to be able to make wine in the middle of the desert and over 8,000 feet altitude. It's only in this region in the world, so it's actually a very special place which not many people know about.

I didn't know anything about it until we went there, being involved in real estate. We stumbled upon a little hobby vineyard on the land and didn't think much of it. But when we tried the wine that the neighbors made we thought, "This is something interesting. This is something special."

I've been to the ranch and the little plot is kind of small, and the stone wall that goes around it is 100 years old. And the vines themselves are over 100 years old. We went into that little plot.

It's 100 by 100 maybe, and there were just bunches of grapes hanging down, and you could just pull them off the vine and they taste great even without turning them into wine. It was pretty unique that it exists where it does, because there is irrigation maintained by the families in the valley for hundreds of years.

Yeah. The fauna changes, everything. You start seeing flying condors. Remember we were there and you're like, "Wow, it's completely different." There you are. Different animals. You're going to have their guanacos that are usually the ones that cause accidents. The deer of Salta.

But it's very nice, and then you end up in a desert again. Then you got to Cardones National Park, but it's all those red mountains that you may see in Salta. You end up feeling like you're in Arizona or the Grand Canyon type of color, with huge mountains ahead. It's beautiful.

That's how they were preserved because it was at such extreme altitude where they were buried. They were almost frozen and then they discovered them, I don't know, I think 14,000 feet or higher. I think it was 20,000 feet. Much more story behind them on how they were buried, but they're super well preserved. You can see the lives of the kids when they're inside the museum.

But it's a big, fantastic region. One of the things that Will said about France and Argentina compared, is that Argentina and the Malbec adapted so well because in south central France in Cahors, you can have 2,500 hours of sun a year. While in Salta you can have 3,500, so that helps. The ripeness of the fruit is completely different, and that's just a start. What he was saying about the thickness of the skin, how it contracts with the temperature change during the day. It's extreme.

Terroirs are different locations where grapes are grown. When they say, "I have a terroir in France or I have a Terroir in Argentina," it all varies depending on what type of soil you have." You can have Calathea soils, you can have alluvial soils, and they're all different types of pretty much sandy

You're looking for grapes that usually grow in very rough areas. And since they need to thrive, they produce better juices and the plant is completely different depending on what characteristics they grow.

Terroirs in Argentina may vary depending on what sand they have. But you're also then adding to different parts. It's the altitudes and the conditions I was mentioning before. The sun is very important, how much exposure do they have. Are they next to a mountain? Do they receive the sun in the morning, do they receive the sun in the afternoon? Do they receive it all day?

All those kinds of things produce different types of fruits, or grapes for the wines. That makes different variations. It's more common now to start seeing bottles of wine that say single vineyard lot X, or 52, lot 29.

Because winemakers have discovered that even in the same terroir, different lots produce different types of grapes. The terroir, when everyone says, "I like the terroir. You can taste minerality in here." It's because they're looking for that type of soil. They know where it's coming from, and those characteristics pass into the graph and into the wine.

When you talk about the science and how the grapes are transformed into wine, one of the things that Argentine prides now is that they have very little intervention.

The conditions are so well suited in some of the spots in Argentina, especially in the south region, that the vineyards are so high in altitude that there are no insects. Or they don't have to use pesticides, the weeds are very little so it's a very clean type of production.

And when they have a good product, they will just have to sit down and start the fermentation, which is quite complicated but it happens naturally. It's just fermenting wine, putting that little bit of yeast if it's needed, or they can just occur naturally as expected.

But after the grapes are picked they're just put into stainless steel barrels or tanks, and then they start the fermentation process. These days it's very minimal intervention, and they just drop the grapes even with the stems, with the skins and everything, and let it sit there with the mosto which is the skin of the grapes.

And then that's when they start getting all the tannings, all the flavors, all the color. People think that white wine, it's because it's green grapes or white grapes but it's not that. It's actually how much exposure they have to the skin.

When all the berries of all the grapes are put into the tanks, what you just have to wait for is the fermentation. And it's usually a natural process where the enzymes or the yeast or single cell organisms start consuming the sugars of all these grapes. And they produce ethanol, carbon dioxide, and what was the third one? And they generate temperature.

Those are three things that happen at the same time when fermentation occurs. It stops automatically because the enzymes stop by itself, because enzymes cannot continue eating. There's no more sugar to produce alcohol, and that's where it stops.

Okay. Alcohol. Fermentation. When's the last time you understood fermentation? And I think one of the nicest things about fermentation is that it has been with us forever, but now we're just starting to play a little bit more with it in terms of temperature controls. Or just recently for the benefit of wine. That's good.

I think it's part of the culture of America also. Being able to industrialize something and being able to replicate it multiple times, as a process and being proud that they were very good at making wine. It's something that America has achieved very well.

And you see we were just talking with a wine producer not very long ago, when we went to visit Napa maybe two months ago. He was explaining to Will that it's about being regular, being constant, and having the same temperatures in your tanks. Having all these little things that even changing a valve will make a difference, how the oxygen affects transferring wine from a tank to a barrel to a bottle.

I think Argentina went through a few phases. They now went through the phase of immigrant wine that is just a necessity of the Italians and Spanish to have wine. Then they started discovering that they can produce bulk wine. They can produce wine, then they have the military dictatorship that crushed a lot of wine vineyards.

And then they were just producing cheap wine. And they were trying to produce wine with the same conditions of Europe. "We're going to make Argentine wines with the same characteristics of Burgundy or Italy."

Instead of knowing what fruit they were having or what grapes they were having, they were just trying to replicate a method. And someone came along and told them, "Hey, you're wasting your time. You have to actually work with what you have and make your own. Not an own method because it's pretty much the same, but you have to work with what you have."

And that's what they started doing, and now we're starting to see a boom of wines of Argentina that talk about an expression of the country, of a terroir, of a region. Even the winemakers. Last year we had a collection with...

I'll tell you, I was doing a wine tasting this Sunday. This weekend, and I was saying, "These guys are not very far from each other on the bottles of Malbec. It's completely different." And I was like, "This is amazing. You guys are finally working out different expressions, different wine making besides when is the right ripeness to pick the grape, when, how they want to blend it."

And that's something you were saying. California is very good at blending things. Argentina is now trying to do the same single vineyard, single only one varietal type of grape blends. But their core is only doing single varietal wines.

Yeah. I lived there for three years, and I developed such a taste for it. But of course, in the beginning the taste I developed was for Mendoza Malbec. I didn't know about the wine from Salta until a little later.

And you'll find that once you develop a taste for the Salta Malbec, you can't really go back to Mendosa, or not too much. Because Salta has that extra kick. It's got that extra umph from the extreme sun and altitude condition.

But anyway, as far as we knew you couldn't find wine from Salta anywhere, especially not the type that we were growing. Diego, working with you, you figured out how to get the wine in a truck over the Andes mountains to a port in Chile, and then up the Pacific coast to Los Angeles. And then eventually to us.

The full journey. Yeah. It started very little. It's nice to be able to work with these small wine producers, because as we've said Salta produces 4% of the wine of Argentina. Only 4%, the rest comes from Mendosa.

And Mendosa, it's very convenient for them because they just cross the border with Chile and that's it. But Salta, I think it's an overnight journey between the mountains. You're crossing deserts, get flat tires, trucks don't want to go and pick up the wine at the winery.

It's a full journey trying to figure out every single step that the bottles survive. Just thinking about it, you have to break more bottles bringing them up than falling down. You have to think of all those conditions.

How to get corks. Corks on importation laws in Argentina. There's only one print machine in the city, so when it's time to produce, everyone is killing to print their labels. You have to work out all these small region business to be able to scale it to be able to bring it to the US. Even with that, it's still hard to compete.

Yeah. And it's always difficult under normal circumstances. It's very tricky to be in the wine business in northern Argentina, and get that wine to Americans at home. But the reason why we do that is because it truly is, as Diego was saying in the winemaking process that they've embraced there.

They are really determined to express the terroir, to have the wine be really authentic to the exact place where it came from. And places at these elevations and these conditions, they only exist here.

And that's why bringing wine that tastes just like that place there, being able to taste that for me living in South Florida. There's no mountain, no elevation for hundreds of miles. But I can have that. I can experience this totally opposite place in the wine, and be able to experience it authentically.

Because for instance, they use indigenous yeast. They use the yeast that develops naturally on the skin of the grape to produce the wine, and that has a number of effects that you wouldn't get. Especially using up all the sugar naturally, so you get a wine that's low or no sugar, versus a more industrial wine from California that has tons of added sugar.

The other thing they do, a wine from northern Argentina, because of the extreme conditions creates a really robust complex flavor on the palette. If you can't get that from a central coast California wine, you just add something called Mega Purple, and it's a grape concentrate that plumps up the wine and sweetens the wine, and solves all the problems.

And so they have a ton of little tricks like this. But then if you're drinking that, it's just like a soda. It's not representative of any terroir anywhere, and they can produce a million gallons of it at any time they want.

That's a totally different thing than what we're doing. Anyway, that's why I feel it's important what we're doing, to let people experience a truly special, unique terroir in this wine they're drinking.

I think it's more important than ever when you're thinking about a post pandemic or just a pandemic situation, where you're at home. You can't travel as much as you would like to, and so to have an authentic experience with a wine that is from a special place I think is really a truly unique, special occasion to be experiencing this place through your taste buds.

Instead of just drinking a grape soda essentially, with most of the wines that you get off the shelf at your grocery store, something like 95% of them have this. They use this Mega Purple in them, and so it's really hard to find an authentic experience just at the grocery store or down at your wine shop.

That's why we want to share these wines with as many people as possible. And if anyone is interested, they can go to ExtremeAltitudeWine.com to see our offerings of Calchaqui Malbecs.

Yes. We started in Argentina and we realized this authenticity truly does create a better experience. And we realized that philosophy is carried on in a number of wine regions around the world.

And so we work with an importer, and before he was involved with us he worked to bring wine back for American travelers in Europe, or around the world. You would be on your honeymoon in Italy or somewhere visiting chateaus and wineries in France. And then room service would bring the wine back for you.

That caused him to develop an intimate knowledge with wine makers and special terroirs, that people who went there would get legitimately excited about and want to experience that again.

And so he helped us identify these other places around the world, especially in the Mediterranean where it has such a long history of wine making. You can find really interesting things if you know where to look, if you've got somebody to guide you.

Then we went to the US. No, we did Australia and New Zealand. We did the US, then we did the Mediterranean. We've done Italy. What we find out is that at the end of the day, we can try to bring from many different places, but it's also a lot of hard work just to bring us more producers. Because we have a lot of bureaucratic things to do to import wine into the US.

But seeing that we can express regions with six bottles of wine, which is the wine collection every quarter that we have, and then we just rotate it. It's very satisfying because you're able to show a little bit of everything.

It comes with a booklet, we tell you the story. An important thing of drinking wine is being able to set yourself in a context. If you're drinking a bottle of wine without knowing anything about it, or where it comes from, or what are you expecting from it, you won't be able to root it somewhere unless you have lots of knowledge around it.

What we try to do is put you into context before you open your bottle of wine. Being able to tell you a little bit of the winemaker, and just make your experience a little bit easier and more enjoyable. Because at the end of the day, that's what we want.

We want to be able to bring wines that people want to enjoy, that it's hard to put yourself in. Really struggle sometimes going into a wine store and then just sitting in front of it, and they have, I don't know, 500 labels. Where do you choose?

Yeah. Before I even started working with the club, I really enjoyed drinking wine. I have already been to New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, and France. I have been doing a little bit more. When I joined the club I did a little bit more, going to the Caucasus, going to Slovakia.

Look into those roots of wine, because they have a lot of history. Trying to expose those little wine producers or known grapes, it's very hard and you have to tell a lot of the story.

My point is in there trying to find points of connection, and being able to bring those how to root or an idea or a story, or something from a terroir or the place it comes from, to be able to explain it to the people in the club. But yeah, traveling is part of it. Not in the pandemic, but when it's possible.

Yeah. I think people are sometimes a little bit afraid of jumping into wines, but I think the only way of learning about wines is actually drinking. This is actually the hard part, but it's a good way to expand your horizons of wine.

Some things we have seen is when they go again to our restaurant, they have one bottle in the collection. Maybe a grape or a brand they recognize, and they go to a restaurant. At least now they know they like that one. That's a good thing to have when they give you a 200 bottle menu of wine. You're like, "Where do I start?"