Chris’ note: U.S. markets are closed today for Labor Day. So instead of our usual fare, you’ll hear from my friend Will Bonner about an entirely different subject.
Will is Legacy Research cofounder Bill Bonner’s eldest son. And he recently founded a unique wine club that has become a hit with your fellow Legacy readers. It gives folks access to wines from remote parts of the world… including Gualfin, his family’s remote ranch high in the Andes in northwestern Argentina.
You can find out how to become a member here. Will’s wines are certainly exclusive. As you’ll see below, members of Will’s team have almost died – at least twice – getting out to the isolated valleys where the unique grapes grow…
Come with me on a journey 5,000 miles away… to a land where campfires burn late into the night as cowboys doze off under the stars…
…where women work looms under the early dawn’s first light…
…where the nearest city is six hours away across a jagged mountain landscape…
…where heaven and Earth seem to become one on a clear, boundless horizon…
…where a small brotherhood of winemakers produce some of the highest-altitude vintages in the world.
Back in 2005, I got a phone call from my father, Bill Bonner.
Now, if you don’t know him, he’s not exactly your average retiree.
He’s in his 70s and still spends every weekend working on his farm: mending wooden fences, repairing the old stone buildings, keeping the fields orderly.
That’s when he’s not writing a book… or playing Johnny Cash on his guitar… or venturing to some little-known corner of the world…
Dad with his cattle
So when he told me that he’d found something special in Argentina…
…well, I knew I was in for an adventure.
It turned out that “something special” was a ranch the size of Rhode Island called Gualfin.
Trouble was… it was located in the Calchaquí Valley, a frontier land way out on Argentina’s northwestern corridor… i.e., the middle of nowhere!
I had to use satellite imagery to look it up…
Gualfin
Go figure – “Gualfin” is an old Indian name for “end of the road.”
Still, Dad was adamant I come check it out.
When I got there (it took me three days), I was swept away by the beauty of the place…
…and how it literally felt like the end of the Earth…
At the end of the Earth…
Initially, we figured we could raise cattle on it.
Dad and I soon discovered it was far too dry and remote to sustain much of a cattle or farming operation… at least, not profitably.
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…
There, gnarled and overgrown, was a long-forgotten vineyard of Malbec grapes the previous owner had planted as an experiment…
What we had discovered, right there on the ranch, was one of the highest-altitude vineyards in the world, at over 8,000 feet…
…and a unique microclimate found nowhere else on Earth.
The Hidden Vineyard at Gualfin – 8,421 feet above the world
As it turned out, we weren’t alone.
All across the Calchaquí, in little valleys hidden away from the world, a small brotherhood of winemakers has toiled away in near obscurity for 200 years… using techniques passed down from father to son… making a wine unlike any other you’ve ever had.
The secret to why these wines are becoming so highly prized today (I’ve seen single bottles go for $500-plus here in the U.S.) lies in the extreme conditions their grapes must survive each passing season: daily blasts of UV light 80% more intense than in Bordeaux… nightly temperature swings of up to 70 degrees…
Yet these grapes also drink pure, nutrient-rich snowmelt trickling down from 10,000 feet.
And because of the altitude, there is less need to drench the vines in chemicals (which isn’t true of many wine regions)…
Nor will the winemakers insult them by mixing in “oak” extracts, dyes (more common than you think), or excess sugar (in fact, the resulting wines are 99% lower in residual sugar than other wines we tested).
Until recently, you pretty much had to be a near-billionaire (or at least friends with one) to get your hands on a bottle of one of these exclusive, high-altitude wines…
After all, most of these wineries are too small and too remote for a major importer to spend time on.
That’s how I came up with the idea of a wine partnership. I would band together some good friends to import the world’s great wines to American shores – sometimes for the first time ever. If we could just get enough people together to fill an entire shipping container, we could make it work.
So began the Bonner Private Wine Partnership. When we first started, we had so little wine, we had to limit membership to just 1,000 members.
It’s not an easy business. Members of my team have almost died at least twice getting out to these isolated little valleys. Currency fluctuations, tariffs, and shipping costs make it hell on a balance sheet.
But in France, they say that a great wine comes not from the grape, but from the character of the man who made it.
It takes a special kind of character to live out high above the world, at what feels like the edge of the Earth.
And it takes a special kind of character to forgo the luxury so common in other wine regions, like Mendoza or Napa, in search of something different.
At the Bonner Private Wine Partnership, we figure if we can keep these isolated winemakers going, the difficulty will be worth it.
Regards,
Will Bonner
Founder, Bonner Private Wine Partnership
P.S. Care to taste extreme-altitude Malbec 150 years in the making? Today, you can reserve some of the Calchaquí Valley’s greatest wines… and have them come straight to your doorstep…
Our next shipment goes out just days from now. You can reserve yours by clicking here… (Supplies are limited and will sell out.)