Editor’s Note: Before you read today’s email, a quick heads-up: we just opened early Black Friday access for our most loyal members, like yourself.
People who’ve stood with us, supported the vineyards we’ve revived, and shown again and again that they understand what real wine tastes like. This is your exclusive invitation.
A Report From Wine Explorer Diego Samper – Calchaquí Valley Wine
I spent about four hundred and thirty miles on the road this week in the north of Argentina…
The kind of miles where the landscape stops being scenery and becomes a companion.
Modern trucks hide trouble. Smooth suspension. Cold AC. A steady hum that lies to you until it can’t.
Then a faint rubber smell slipped into the car. The kind that tells you something is wrong long before the truck admits it.
Trouble arrived as the full hit of burnt rubber.
It was day one. I was approaching a riverbed full of rocks the size of watermelons on my way to visit Matías at Arca Yaco when I realized the tire had fully blown.
I started calling fellow winemakers, not to borrow a spare, but to ask where I could replace one. Up here you cannot drive without a spare. This place does not permit it. Every call began with the same line:
“Welcome to the Valley.”
I was back in the Calchaquí Valley, the place that shapes so much of our work and where the first collection of 2026 will begin to take form. Not just Gualfin. The entire northern stretch. High, remote, and demanding in ways you only understand when you stand there in the wind and the silence.
Nothing behaves up here.
Lunch becomes dinner. Wine arrives before anyone asks. Asados stretch far into the night. The sun burns clean. The nights fall like a stone. The fire becomes the only honest light.
This time I brought Amelia. Many of you know her voice from your orders. If she missed your calls or replied slowly this week, now you know why. She was up here with me, far from any signal, meeting the people behind your bottles and seeing the parts of this operation that never make it into emails.
Visiting them now feels like visiting family. We ask about their children and their parents before we get into wine. They ask about the members. They thank you.
Carrying the message from this corner of Argentina has never been easy, but they know someone out there is drinking what they spend their lives making.
These are some of the hardest-working winemakers in the country. The north produces just four percent of Argentina’s wine. They will never reach big importer levels, and maybe that is exactly why their wines matter.
They are made for people who look for truth, not volume.
Amelia saw that immediately.
We move not only from vineyard to vineyard but from table to table and clay oven to clay oven.
In Salta nearly every home has one. They are the air fryers of the north. Bread, meat, vegetables, everything tastes better touched by that heat.
Agustín with his stories and the new valleys he has been planting for Sunal. He talks about land the way others talk about brothers. These projects will soon reach the club and our partners, but up here they are still young, still finding their shape.
Matías with his quiet confidence, pouring Finca El Monte and Amar y Vivir, wines that feel carved from the same hillside but speak in different voices.
Raúl with his smile and the endless stories of Tacuil, a man who seems stitched to the history of this place.
David, the wild American who somehow made peace with a valley that bends for no one. And Fede, whose wine ends up on what feels like every table in Argentina, sold out for now but returning in 2026.
Then came Angastaco. Founded in 1870. Silent for years. Now slowly waking. We cleared it out. Fixed the roof. The massive old barrels still stand in the shadows like sleeping animals. The building is rough, but the vineyard outside is alive and bright.
And like our club, we are playing the long game here.
Fixing instead of replacing. Preserving instead of discarding. Keeping history alive. A few cents at a time, with the help of this club, we are bringing a lost bodega back into the world.
At Tacuil, we tasted Tacana from barrels and tanks. The next vintage is already taking shape. Young, tense, bright. Altitude you can feel before you taste.
At night, foxes came near the vineyards, curious and calm. Condors drifted above the cliffs during the day. The hills shifted color by the hour. Long tables. Guitars. Smoke from the asado rising into the cold air.
This valley tolerates you, but it never lets you forget where you stand.
Behind all of this is real work.
The region is lonely. It is far from anything soft. It survives because people stay when the rest of us go home and wait for the wine to be ready.
That is what Mariah Bonner, Will’s sister, and her husband Adrien did. They moved to Salta. They drive the long roads. They keep the vineyards tuned and alive. They are the quiet force behind everything you will taste from Tacana next year.
I’m writing this as I wait to board my flight back to Buenos Aires. I’m not sure if the color on my face is sun from the valley or dust that refuses to leave.
What I do know is that every mile, every bump, every riverbed, every delay, and yes, even the blown tire, was part of the work we promise you. The walking. The tasting. The listening. The real boots on the ground.
Instead of giving you a long report, we are sharing the photos from the trip.
They will never show the valley the way it feels, but they are the closest thing we can send besides the wine itself.
If you want the first look at the land shaping your 2026 collection, start there.
While you’re looking, feel free to leave any comments on the photos. Let us know what took your breathe away, what you’re most excited for, or what you want to see more of… or just click here to reply.
Salud,
Diego Samper
Bonner Private Wines
