🇦🇷 Argentina · Cuyo
The Valle de Uco is one of the great names in Argentine wine: a high-altitude region at the foot of the Andes and in the shadow of the imposing Tupungato volcano (6,570 m), where malbec, chardonnay and cabernet franc reach an expression that traveled the world. It is made up of three Mendoza departments — Tupungato, Tunuyán and San Carlos — and lies about 90 minutes south of the city of Mendoza along the legendary Route 40.
What sets the Valle de Uco apart is altitude: many vineyards sit between 900 and 1,500 meters above sea level, which gives intense sunny days, cold nights and a temperature swing that concentrates color, aroma and freshness in the grape. Add the pure meltwater from the mountains and a landscape of vine rows disappearing towards the snowy peaks, and you have the classic image of top-end Argentine wine tourism.
But the valley is not only wine. It is rural tourism, horse riding, chef-driven cooking paired with winery labels, quiet towns such as Tupungato and Tunuyán, and places loaded with history such as El Manzano Histórico, which commemorates San Martín's return after the liberation campaign. Spectacular winery architecture, lunches among the vines and mountain silence: the Valle de Uco is a place to take your time.
The Valle de Uco owes its name to Uco, a Huarpe chief from the time the Spanish explorers arrived, in the middle of the 16th century. The area was the southernmost reach of Inca influence before the conquest, and later, in the 17th century, the Jesuits founded the Curato de Uco and began evangelising. At El Manzano Histórico, in Tunuyán, José de San Martín's passage on his return from the liberation campaign is commemorated. The great wine transformation came with European immigration at the end of the 19th century and, above all, with the boom in high-altitude wine tourism in recent decades, which turned the valley into a world-famous destination. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The land of sun and good wine: a Huarpe oasis at the foot of Aconcagua, cradle of San Martín's Army of the Andes, rebuilt after the 1861 earthquake and turned into the world capital of Malbec and the high mountains.
Read the history of Mendoza →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In July 2019 the World's Best Vineyards academy — an international jury of almost 500 wine and travel experts — announced the best vineyard in the world to visit. It was not in Bordeaux, or Napa, or Tuscany: it was in Paraje Altamira, a corner of stones and poplars in the Valle de Uco, in Mendoza. Bodega Zuccardi Valle de Uco, a bunker of concrete and rock that looks as if it grew out of the ground, took the title again in 2020 and in 2021: first three times, something no other vineyard on the planet has managed to date.
The astonishing part is that until three decades ago this celebrated valley was an open secret among smallholders: land of apples, pears and garlic, a high-altitude desert at the foot of the Tupungato volcano where very few dared plant fine grapes because the frosts burned the buds. The story of how a farming oasis on the southern frontier of the Inca empire ended up as the world capital of high-altitude malbec is one of the best stories in modern wine — and it begins, as almost everything here does, with meltwater and with a chief named Uco.
The valley carries the name of a man: Uco, a Huarpe chief who controlled this land when the first Spanish explorers arrived, in the mid-16th century. The Huarpe were a farming and pottery-making people who had solved the essential problem of Cuyo — how to grow crops in a desert — with a network of canals and acequias that spread the water of the streams and the mountain meltwater. That water engineering, inherited and extended by every later generation, is the real founder of the oasis: without acequias there would have been no colonial smallholdings, no poplars, no award-winning vineyards.
Before the Spanish, the valley was the southernmost reach of Tawantinsuyu influence: the Incas are thought to have partly controlled the region between 1470 and 1535, folding it into their network of roads and tambos running down the spine of the Andes. In fact much of the irrigation technology the Spanish found in working order bore an Inca stamp. Around 1551 the explorer Francisco de Villagra, returning from Peru on his way to Chile, crossed Cuyo and left the first European accounts of this land and its people. The collision of those two worlds — the Indigenous oasis and colonial ambition — opened the longest transformation in the valley's history.
One fact surprises many travelers: for more than two centuries Mendoza and the Valle de Uco were administratively Chilean. From the founding of Mendoza in 1561 until the creation of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776, the whole of Cuyo depended on the Captaincy General of Chile, on the far side of the mountains: the authorities, the trade and even the bishops arrived by crossing the Andes. Life in the valley revolved around cattle estancias, irrigated crops and droves of cattle fattened on these pastures before crossing to Santiago.
The Jesuits settled in that frontier world in the 17th century. Around what is now Tupungato's founding marker they organized the Curato de Uco, from where they took on the evangelisation of the Huarpe population and built the first stable settlements. From that period survives a string of Andean adobe chapels — such as those at La Carrera and the high hamlets of Tupungato — which today form part of tourist and pilgrimage circuits, and which are among the oldest buildings in Mendoza. When the crown expelled the Jesuits from the Americas in 1767, their land and chapels passed into other hands, but the human layout of the valley was already drawn: small towns, acequias and mountains.
In January 1823 an exhausted rider came down from the Paso del Portillo, at more than 4,300 meters, and camped beside an apple tree in the Río Grande basin, in what is now the department of Tunuyán. It was José de San Martín, returning to Argentina after a decade of liberation campaigns in Chile and Peru, by then with no army, no office and his health spent. Only one man had gone up into the mountains to meet him: Major Manuel de Olazábal, his old grenadier officer, who improvised a shelter of ponchos over the branches of the apple tree so the Liberator could rest. That small scene — a continental hero sleeping under a fruit tree, home again and almost incognito — became one of the most human moments of the San Martín story.
The tree fared better than many monuments: the province declared it a historic monument in 1938 (decree 169/38) and the nation did the same in 2019 (decree 769/2019). In 1950, the Year of the Liberator, the monument 'Retorno a la Patria' by the sculptor Luis Perlotti was unveiled beside its remains, inspired by a painting by Fidel Roig Matóns, showing San Martín and Olazábal in bronze, stone and travertine. Today El Manzano Histórico is the symbolic heart of the valley: a nature reserve of hills and streams where the Cruce de los Andes on horseback is run every summer and where Argentine history is within arm's reach.
The vine reached Cuyo with the Spanish in the 16th century, but the wine industry was really born with European immigration and the railway. When the train arrived in Mendoza in 1885 and connected the vineyards with the huge Buenos Aires market, immigrant pioneers such as the Italian Juan Giol, the Swiss Bautista Gargantini and the Italian Pascual Toso built wineries that came to be among the largest in the world. Thousands of Italian, Spanish and French families brought vine stock, techniques and a wine culture that transformed the Mendoza oasis.
But note: for almost the whole of the 20th century that revolution ran through the north of the province, not here. The Valle de Uco, higher and colder, with late frosts that burned the buds, remained smallholding country: apples, pears, plums, garlic and potatoes. Tunuyán became a byword for apples in Argentina — a perfect irony for the land of the Manzano Histórico — and the grapes grown here were mostly ordinary varieties for table wine. The old trellises and century-old rows of La Consulta and San Carlos, which winemakers now revere as genetic treasures of malbec, were then simply smallholders' vines. The valley was waiting, without knowing it, for the wine world to discover that its great flaw — the cold of altitude — was in fact its superpower.
The valley's modern history has a date and a place: 1992, Gualtallary, Tupungato. That year Nicolás Catena Zapata, obsessed with producing an Argentine wine that could compete with the best in the world, planted the Adrianna vineyard at almost 1,500 meters, where the agronomists of the day insisted the grapes would never ripen. The bet came out the opposite way to expectations: the intense daytime sun, the cold nights and the calcareous, stony soils produced grapes with unprecedented concentration, freshness and minerality. Adrianna ended up recognized as one of the great vineyards on the planet — some call it South America's 'grand cru' — and behind Catena came the avalanche.
In the late 1990s the Dutch businessman Mijndert Pon founded Salentein and added monumental architecture and art to the valley (his Killka space opened in 2006); the French oenologist Michel Rolland brought together a group of Bordeaux investors and created Clos de los Siete in Vista Flores, with 850 hectares; and Mendoza families such as the Zuccardis moved their quality bet to the stony soils of the southern valley. In 2013 Paraje Altamira became one of the first geographical indications in Argentina delimited by soil study, and in 2016 Bodega Zuccardi Valle de Uco opened there, the winery with the three world titles. Today the Valle de Uco — always watched over by the 6,570-meter Tupungato volcano — is packed with luxury lodges, award-winning restaurants and dozens of designer wineries between Gualtallary, Vista Flores and Altamira. It took five centuries for Chief Uco's desert to reveal its winning card: altitude.