The Wine That Almost Cost Me My Life
A flash flood. A dead river bed turned raging torrent. A truck going under. And at the end of it — the greatest bottle of wine I've ever tasted.
It's a strange feeling when your truck is partway underwater and you're still in it. Especially when it's pitch black. Actually, it's not a strange feeling at all. It's panic.
The river bed had been completely dry an hour before. Bone dry — the kind of cracked earth you only see at the edge of the world, where the desert meets the Andes and the wind comes at you sideways and the nearest city is six hours behind you on a road that barely deserves the name. We had crossed it without a second thought on the way in.
Then the sky opened up somewhere in the mountains above us. And the desert, with nowhere to put the water, sent it all our way at once.
My brother gunned the engine. The headlights were under. The current was pushing us sideways. Across the raging torrent — what had been a wide, silent nothing sixty minutes earlier — a flashlight cut through the dark. One of the vineyard workers, probably. He'd seen the headlights sink beneath the surface.
Then a miracle. The front wheels caught something — a log, a boulder, impossible to know — and gave us just enough purchase to push forward, out of the current, onto a sandbank on the far side.
An old man ran over with the flashlight. The people of the Calchaquí don't scare easily. But this old man's face showed something close to alarm.
Vino? we asked. Bueno, he replied.
Minutes later, we were sitting in a gaucho bar at the end of the road, uncorking a bottle. And everything — the flood, the dark, the panic — immediately became worth it.
Why the world's greatest wine comes from a place most people will never go
Most people, when they think of Argentine wine, think of Mendoza. Which is fair. Mendoza is beautiful. It has five-star hotels, ultra-modern wineries, paved roads.
But Mendoza is not where I go.
Five hundred miles to the north, past the point where the asphalt runs out and the landscape turns savage, lies a little valley that most of the wine world has never heard of. The Calchaquí. Squeezed between miles of desert on one side and the jagged peaks of the Andes on the other, accessible only by a road that requires four-wheel drive, extra tires, and a casual relationship with personal safety.
The drive takes the better part of a day. You pass through high desert that looks like the surface of another planet. The fog comes in so thick you can't see ten feet in front of you. The altitude starts pulling the oxygen out of the air. The temperature swings 77 degrees between noon and midnight.
And then, finally, you reach what the locals call the end of the road. The Calchaquí Valley. A green slash of life in the middle of nothing. Rows of old vines on terraced hillsides. Adobe farmhouses. A silence so complete it feels intentional.
Location Intelligence
The Calchaquí Valley sits at the northwestern extreme of Argentina's wine country — so remote that its wines are virtually unknown outside South America. Entire vintages sell out in 24 hours to private lists of collectors. A single bottle, at the rare retailer who stocks them, can fetch over $500. Most Americans have never heard its name.
How a 200-year-old act of preservation became one of wine's greatest accidents
Nearly two hundred years ago, a few determined souls carried malbec vine cuttings across the Andes from Chile. They planted those vines in the valley and went on with their lives.
It turned out to be one of the most important acts of botanical preservation in the history of wine. Not long after, a blight swept through Europe and wiped out virtually every malbec vine on the continent. The great French wine regions had to start over, replanting from American rootstock.
But the blight never reached the Calchaquí. The isolation that makes this place so hard to get to also kept its vineyards safe. The old French vines are still here. Still on their original rootstock. Some of them more than a century old.
The first time I tasted a wine from up here, I sat completely still for about thirty seconds. I didn't know what to say. I'd tasted a lot of wine. Nothing had prepared me for this.
— Will Bonner, after his first bottle of Calchaquí malbecWhat extreme altitude does to a grape — and to the person who drinks it
The most isolated vineyard in all the Calchaquí is called Luracatao. At 8,950 feet above sea level — the third highest commercial vineyard on earth — it sits on a northerly slope completely surrounded by mountains.
The winemaker, Augustin Lanus, remembers the first time he made wine from these grapes. The color was so intense it stained his stainless steel fermentation vats red and wouldn't come out. He called the wine Sunal Ilógico — illogical — because nothing about it made rational sense.
England's top sommelier tasted it and wrote: "Amazing wines and a great story. I was very inspired." In a blind tasting with legendary wine curator Joaquin Aberdi, Sunal came in first in its category.
And what the critics don't mention — what I find just as remarkable as the taste — is what's not in the bottle. No filtration. No additives. No synthetic colorants. Just fermented grapes from hundred-year-old vines on a mountainside at the end of the earth.
World's 3rd highest vineyard
standard California red
original French rootstock
sell out in
The families who refused every shortcut the wine industry ever invented
The families who make wine here don't have marketing teams or brand managers. What they have is land that has been in their families for generations, a way of working that hasn't changed since before Argentina was Argentina, and a stubborn resistance to every shortcut the modern wine industry has invented.
Raúl Dávalos, whose family has been making wine in the Calchaquí for two centuries, once told his son he would shoot him if he ever aged a Tacuil wine in oak barrels. It wasn't the Calchaquí way. It still isn't. These are wines made by people for whom compromise is not a business strategy but a personal failure.
That's the spirit behind every bottle in the Wine Explorer's Club collection. Not a curated portfolio or a carefully managed brand. A direct line to the people making the most extraordinary wine in the world, in a place most people will never go, by methods that have survived two centuries because they work.
What we're sending to your door — and why you can't get these anywhere else
Sunal Ilógico Malbec 2019
Zero filtration. Natural fermentation. Blind tasting winner.
Finca Gualfin Tacana 2023
Old-growth vines. Original rootstock. Rich cocoa, dark fruit.
Tacuil Unoak Malbec 2022
200-year family tradition. 100% unoaked. Layers of black olive.
Piloto de Prueba 2021
3,200 bottles only. An experiment too good to stop making.
Six bottles from the world's most remote wine valley — sourced directly, no middlemen, no industrial shortcuts. Your first collection ships at a $50 discount. Cancel anytime. 100% satisfaction guaranteed.
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The Bonner Private Wine Partnership is your passport to the world’s most extraordinary small-batch wines—sourced from remote, family-run vineyards across Europe and South America. We deliver handcrafted, additive-free wines you won’t find in stores… and the stories behind them. No middlemen. No mass production. Just real wine, for those who crave something rare.
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