How I Nearly Died in the Andes: Part I

James’ note: It’s Christmas week, so we’re taking a break from our normal fare here at The Daily Cut…

Today and tomorrow we bring you the story of how my good friend Will Bonner (Legacy Research cofounder Bill’s oldest son) almost died in the Andes… TWICE!

It’s like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.

So fix yourself a nice cup of coffee or a stiff drink… Settle into your comfiest seat… And enjoy…

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Suddenly, it was pitch black…

I realized that our truck headlights had gone under the roaring water.

I began to feel the front wheels lift up as the truck slowly turned with the current of the flood…

The woman in the seat next to me screamed. In the back seat, our ranch hand Gustavo began praying to the Virgin Mary.

It was at that point that I began to question the wisdom of traveling 5,000 miles by plane, then another 500 miles in a smaller plane, then a six-hour off-road trek on the one day a year it actually rains in Northwestern Argentina…

…all to find a single bottle of dark red wine – so opaque it’s known as “black wine” – grown at extreme altitudes (above 8,000 feet)… in valleys so remote only a Bonner would ever go there.

But I’m getting ahead of myself… Let’s start at the beginning…

I first arrived in Argentina in 2006, when I moved my family to Buenos Aires. It was around the same time that my father acquired a ranch in the Andean foothills, far to the northwest of the country.

As it turned out, the ranch was far too remote and dry to sustain itself purely on cattle or farming.

But riding across the property one day, we came to a small valley fed by a thin trickle of water snaking its way down from the mountains…

And there, gnarled and overgrown, we discovered a long-forgotten vineyard of Malbec grapes planted by the previous owner as an experiment…

What we had discovered, right there on the ranch, was one of the highest-altitude vineyards in the world… at over 8,400 feet…

… and a remote wine region unlike any other.

When I popped my first bottle of extreme-altitude Argentine wine… when hints of balsamic, leather, and camphor wood drifted across my palate…

…well, I was hooked.

You see, over the years, I had grown flat-out bored, unimpressed, and bummed out by just about every wine in my local store!

Here’s why…

First, there’s a lot of cheating that goes into that cheap wine from your local supermarket:

• When they can’t afford oak barrels… they use “oak flavoring” and other additives

• When the wine isn’t dark enough… they add purple dye called “Mega Purple” (far more common than you think)

• When the wine has any hint of sediment from the soil and air (which is what makes wines unique – the goût du terroir, as the French say)… they use “fining agents” like potassium ferrocyanide (yes, “-cyanide”)

• When there’s a hint of bad weather, they harvest the grapes when they’re still green… and cover it up by adding more sugar!

You can see why the alcohol industry fights tooth and nail to keep ingredients off of labels, spending over $30 million for lobbying last year.

But it gets worse…

Did you know that a 2013 study of French wines found traces of pesticides in 90% of them?

And a lab test of 10 Californian wines found the weed-killer glyphosate in every single bottle.

They’ve stripped out the richness… the character of wine… everything that makes a bottle burst with life… and then added a lot of stuff that you don’t want!

Contrast that to the wine I came across in Valle Calchaquí…

It’s unfiltered… and made with indigenous yeast… and handpicked grapes… and fined with natural egg whites rather than chemicals…

Levels of residual sugar are also a fraction of that found in most wines.

And because of the isolation and extreme conditions up where the grapes grow, the high levels of pesticides found in regions like Bordeaux and California are simply unnecessary.

But the true beauty of this wine is the remarkable flavor…

Some people claim you can actually taste a slight hint of smoke carried down into our valley from the lonely campfires that burn out on the high desert plains…

…as cowboys lay out under the stars, their ponchos wrapped tight against them to protect them from the howling winds that sweep across this seemingly endless expanse…

…where my truck found itself ensnared in a flash flood.

To be continued tomorrow…

Regards,

Will Bonner
Founder, Bonner Private Wine Partnership

P.S. Care to discover what 8,000 feet and one of the most isolated terroirs in the world taste like? We have a limited number of bottles of the Bonner family wine, Tacana (8,400 feet, hand-harvested, biodynamic, no additives), for Daily Cut readers to claim. You can reserve yours by clicking here…

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