Not many people appreciate the connection between fine Malbec wines and volcanoes.

I'm traveling to Mendoza, Argentina to make that connection.

Mendoza is a large city surrounded by vineyards and to the west the misty mountains, the towering Andes.

The city is an oasis of sorts, along a fabled highway Rute Quarante, Route 40.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

The province and the city of Mendoza in western Argentina lie at the base of the Andes that 6,000 mile long range.

It separates Argentina from Chile.

It's a barrier to transportation, but it's also a blessing that has brought fertile soil and moisture to a parched land.

To visit the vineyards, you must first visit Mendoza, the largest Argentine city of the Andes.

Its origins go back hundreds of years.

Mendoza not only has an independence plaza and its religious plaza but it has three more a total of five and their set with independence in the middle of a square that has at its corners, four other plazas.

Well, this is the Plaza España and they've got this mosaic of the history of the Americas from this Hispanic standpoint.

This is a perfect example of the way Argentines view their Spanish heritage and the Spanish culture, so we do have Don Quixote here and Sancho Panza.

Sancho Panza.

Of course, Argentines believe that they are European more than anything else and we'll see that as we move along these series of murals.

Here are the, an Indian who is under the leadership of the priest working the land in the European way, with a pick, with metal that they didn't have.

And Spaniards came with the idea of converting the indigenous population then teaching them how to behave like Europeans.

The irony is and you can see it in this next big one here are all of the things that the Europeans agreed to teach the Indians, we're now in charge, but Argentina more than any other country in the Americas exterminated the Indigenous population, the irony there.

Yes, but they did it by law because they recognized the Indigenous peoples as human beings and the other conquering nations didn't.

Dave, right there.

Oh, that's Mendoza wine.

That's Mendoza wine in the making from the very beginning.

What put Mendoza on the map is wine.

The vineyards that now number in the hundreds.

The Andes are our source of water.

All the water that we use in Mendoza come from the river, the Andes grown rivers or coming from snow melt.

The Andes gives us where the origin is of these wonderful soils.

They were the origin of the different soil types.

They were the origin of the rivers that made a different oasis, so we wouldn't be anything without the Andes here.

You can translate the Andes to the winemaking industry.

All you see green in Mendoza is because someone planted it there and made sure that that plant will get water, yes.

With an average of eight inches of rain a year, the grapes will not be able to grow in just a natural way.

They need to be watered, so high altitude means less atmosphere.

Malbec nowadays, is the number one planted variety in the whole Argentina and it's been always there.

Malbec has always been in the top three.

A modern winery has to have a good marketing department and bring in the tourists.

This group is from Brazil.

The closest place to Brazil where Brazilians can get really good wine is Mendoza.

(Portuguese) We came here to visit Mendoza and find more about Argentine wines, but we also came to see the Andes and see the landscape around Mendoza.

You might say we are here to enjoy the wines and take in the offbeat side of this wine country.

We are with a group of friends from Brazil taking a wine tour.

We came to the region to sample all the different Argentine wines.

We are also escaping the craziness of Carnival at home.

I am Argentine.

My wife is Brazilian.

She and I have been married for seventeen years.

I've always appreciated fine wines.

This is only my second visit to Mendoza since I moved to Brazil 17 years ago.

Last year we were here for ten days, but this year for only five days.

We came to enjoy fine wines and good food.

I've always associated Mendoza with fine wines.

I have a restaurant in Brazil and am excited about pairing fine wines with food.

This is a great place to learn how to do this.

Mostly we have here in our winery, from Brazil, but we have lots of people that come from U.S.A., from Canada as well.

Those are the countries that visit us more, too as well from Europe.

Malbec shows Argentina, so in order to make wine you need a lot of people and culture behind it.

Argentina is among the new world of the winemaking countries.

Argentina is probably the oldest because we have a huge Italian and Spanish heritage, like the Catena family does.

So my point of view is that Malbec shows the expression of the culture of the whole winemaking culture.

The Spaniards coming from Chile crossed over the Andes and entered this incredible desert area and discovered that even though it's a desert.

It has fertility.

It has opportunities for growing grapes and other crops.

In the 19th century, Italian immigrants came to the Mendoza area and they had a commitment to drinking table wines and so they began producing wines of all kinds in this area and shipping it in bulk to Buenos Aires.

Then in 1900, they began to experiment with different kinds, different varieties of wines that were richer, more expensive, and had the potential of a world market.

Malbec is perfectly suited for the Mendoza area.

Malbec itself arrived right at the perfect time in the global wine market, because French wines, Italian wines, Californian wines, Australian wines had skyrocketed in price because of the demand and the interest in premiere wines, premium wines, and here was Malbec, incredible tasting wine at great prices and so the Argentines recognized what was happening, took advantage of it and the rest as we like to say is history.

Watch the mud.

It's not real muddy because they use drip irrigation.

It's very efficient.

These are their tubes underneath the soil here and they just ooze the water out and sometimes they add the fertilizer to the water so they don't have to make a separate operation.

These are the Malbecs, you got to taste them.

Grab yourself a few.

You notice that they are bigger than the Cabernet?

And bigger than the Syrah.

They are just so big and have a distinctive flavor.

You know most people don't think of wine grapes as being juicy, but they are delicious and you can make great juice from them and drink it.

Now you view that is sacrilege.

I do view that as sacrilege, but let's leave grape juice making to someone else and where we are let's go to the Malbec.

You mean you're not going to buy Argentine grape juice?

Ah, never.

We're having thunder and lightening all over the place, but if this rain does get here it can do damage to the grapes.

So I would like to request is that it rains everywhere that there are not grapes.

Yes.

And have that rain there and keep these dry.

Look, these are tourists coming by during the harvest season.

They come from all over Argentina, actually from all over the world to see this particular Catena.

This is middle earth for Malbec wines.

To appreciate the origins of Malbec, I want to travel inside the Andes to see that origin of all that water and soil, but not many roads penetrate the steep mountains.

It's a long haul to an accessible volcano.

For Argentines, Route 40, they call Ruta Quarante is similar to what Route 66 is in the United States.

It has this romantic, historical connection with people all over the country.

As we leave Mendoza, the highway is a double highway, well-paved, well-maintained.

As we go south, it will get narrower and narrower and at some point it will become dirt, but that's a long way away yet.

It's the craziest thing, but all over Argentina in the most isolated places you see these trees decorated with these red cloths and it's a shrine to Gauchito Gil.

I've never heard of.. Look, it's full of something in there.

Well, let me take a quick look.

Yeah, you're the historian.

It looks like junk, but you can see here's medallions, a playing card for good luck, and right here Antonio Mamerto Gil whose miracles.

This is incredible so we can find out that he lays on hands and cures people.

He was an actual fellow.

He himself is real and he gained some animosity toward the wealthy, was kicked out of his regimen and probably executed, but warned people that he could do miracles and now in Argentina, a huge portion of the population believes in his ability, still to do miracles.

So they make offerings in these shrines.

So this is a special room, storage for the best casks, the special casks?

Not only the special cask, but also the special wines that we produce here.

This is a selection.

Each cask will carry...almost all of them will have different ones.

Each one will be slightly different then?

Yes, absolutely.

They will be differently picked, different locations, different picking times, different soil types within the same vineyard.

So it's all part of our collection of wines being aged.

And how long will they be aged here in this room?

The average will be 24 months.

All of them are aged in French oak.

Look at the color of that.

It is rich!

This is Malbec from our higher altitude vineyard Adrianna.

It's 1,500 meters... That is high, that's... Something like about 5,000 feet.

Well, that's very high.

You see Malbes need color and that's purple, yes?

That's purple.

That's what I mean when I say intense purple.

Three main descriptors in the nose for Malbec you need to find viol flowers; you need to find dark fruit and plums.

Those are the three main things.

Plums?

Yes, you find them differently in different areas of Mendoza.

Adrianna, the high altitude vineyards will give you more dark fruit.

The southern vineyard will give you flowers and the vineyards closer to the city will give plum character.

So that's Malbec and then in the mouth, the most important thing in Malbec is that it needs to be gentle, it needs to be smooth, round.

This is something very particular in the Malbec coming from Argentina, because of the high altitude and desert conditions.

The Malbec produces a type of tannins that obstruct us in the mouth that will make it very blush, very soft, very velvety.

May we try it?

Yes, this is Malbec.

Salute.

The Andes separate Argentina from Chile.

The common borders are over 2,000 miles long.

It contains the highest peaks of all of the Americas.

The five highest peaks are in the vicinity of Mendoza.

Three of them are over 22,000 feet in elevation and all of that vast distance there is only one highway that connects the two places for shipping.

Where the road turns to dirt in southern Mendoza and we keep going up into the cordillera, the foothills of the Andes.

The pavement is gone, dirt road ahead.

We're entering into Patagonia.

It's hard to believe that this landscape was once flat, but with the building of the Andes, everything tilted up and so this side of the hill went up and up until it cracked off and faulted and this whole valley, that huge fault that dropped down below.

This goes on and on and on into the Andes and the Andes is the greatest story in the world of mountain building and plate tectonics.

A few decades ago, geologists discovered that here and there in southwest Mendoza there were deposits of oil.

They put in a lot of derricks and a lot of drilling, so far the results have been not what they have expected, but many Mendozans believed and still believe that in addition to wine and skiing, oil may be in their future.

It's a mixed blessing.

We are here at about 4,800 feet.

The road continues, dirt into Chile and goes up to 13,000 feet.

In southern Mendoza, Ruta Quarante passes through what was once the most violent volcanic place on earth.

An example is up on this cliff here, if we see that rim, that was a flow of lava and if we turn around and look on the other side of the valley, we see another cliff.

That was the same lava flow on the other side.

So this whole region was a massive red flow of lava.

As the geological forces tore the canyon apart and the river cleaned things out, it shaped the valley, but it's a clear indication of what was once a catastrophically gorgeous lava flow.

This volcanic field, which is 20 miles long and 20 miles wide, was once one huge, bulging mass of molten lava and here we can see how it flowed out of the hills.

The black blobs over there coming down were red at one point, reached down here at the bottom of the valley and crossed and the Rio Grande, the river had to carve out this canyon to make its way down to the Atlantic, which is another 800 miles away.

So, I'll cross this ancient roadway.

The planks look as though they will hold my massive weight.

Oh, and here I see how deeply the river has cut into the lava and look at the, this lava is very, very deep, flowed across the whole canyon and over these millennia, these tens of thousands, 100 of thousands of years.

The river has carved this gorge.

It's at least 75 feet deep and the water has managed to burnish the sides of the lava, but where we see that sheen that means that there was once water flowing over it so that has been there forever and the river continues to cut it down, probably at the rate of a millimeter every 50 years.

That water has to be at least 40 feet deep.

This is a good-sized river coming out of the Andes and it is probably only 8 feet wide.

So this is the very southern end of the province of Mendoza.

What a fitting place.

I'm going to get my parting shots.

So goodbye to Mendoza, wine, oil, lava.

I'm going south.

If I'm really sly, I can move out here to get closer.

Don't fly away, please, please.

Ouch, golly.

So the hawk is sitting right there, it's its favorite rock you can tell because of the droppings there, the white.

He doesn't seem to be terribly afraid of me.

What a magnificent beast, an Andean hawk of some kind.

There he just added to the pile of excrescence there.

Thanks.

That's nature in the raw.

No mater how hard you try on a dirt road through a lava field, it's going to be bumpy and Ruta Quarante used to be dirt for hundreds and hundreds of miles, maybe thousands of miles and now the government has paved more than half of it, but the rough parts still are rough parts and man, when you hit lava, it challenges your road smoothing skills.

This field just flew downhill.

We're going downhill and it follows the contour of the hills for miles and miles.

Out here one the plains way out there, all of the sudden I stumble on this huge boulder.

It's 12 feet tall and must weigh several hundred tons, but if I look around in all directions, there's no other rock anywhere.

How the heck did it get here?

Well, the answer is, it's called an erratic.

It was brought here by a glacier.

The glacier moved carrying everything in front of it, enveloped this huge boulder, brought it, stopped, melted, and deposited this nice little rock right out here in the middle of nowhere.

The Domuyo volcano is a remarkably effective piece of mountain building.

It has devastated this countryside, but created a countryside at the same time and there were lava flows, pyroclastic flows all over the place that had created this amazing landscape.

It's also considered to be the northern most point of Patagonia.

It's the highest peak in all of Patagonia and many people consider it to be a dividing point between the province of Mendoza and the province of Neoquen.

If you visit Devil's tower in Wyoming or Devil's Post Pile in California, you'll see examples of what are called columnar basalts.

They are six sided columns that form in lava, if the lava flow is deep enough and it cools slowly enough.

It will contract and form these perfect hexagonal forms.

Here in Argentina, you can see as good of an example of columnar basalts as anywhere in the world.

The Andes have risen as a result of earthquakes and volcanic explosions, so I think it's safe to say behind every bottle of Mendozino wine is a cataclysmic, volcanic eruption.

Join us next time with me David Yetman.

Zapotecs once dominated Oaxaca from the valleys to the coast.

When coffee arrived in Mexico, their communities still controlled the mountains and the beaches.

Coffee production and hurricanes are both expanding and the plantations are scrambling to adapt to the new climatic regimes.

Coffee drinkers everywhere are rooting for their success.

Mendoza is full of these ditches with water in them.

It would be a lawyer's delight in the U.S. because if you'd fall into them, but here they are actually part of the ancient, ancient irrigation system.

All through the city.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

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