Argentina
Bodega Colomé
Vineyards past three thousand metres, with a James Turrell light museum on the valley floor.
Bodega Colomé sits at 2,300 metres in a remote fold of the Calchaquí Valleys, and its highest plantings at Altura Máxima climb past 3,100 — among the very highest vineyards on Earth, producing Malbec so unlike its Mendoza equivalent that critics describe them as effectively different wines. The same silent estate holds one of the most significant permanent collections of James Turrell's light art anywhere, in a museum built for it.
The estate's vineyards are documented to 1831 — Argentina's oldest working wine estate by its own certified history — restored and expanded from 2001 under the Hess family. Altitude does the winemaking's first draft: fierce ultraviolet thickens skins and concentrates the anthocyanins that give the wines their colour and structure. The Turrell museum, opened in 2009, holds nine permanent installations built under the artist's supervision — rooms in which colour and dimension are perceived directly, without reference to shape — and the estate receives deliberately — two hours of dirt track beyond Molinos leave improvisation nowhere to stand. The next electric light is a valley away.
Couple
Serious wine, serious art and genuine remoteness in one place — the world's highest Malbec at dinner, a Turrell light room before bed, and a silence outside that no city hotel can purchase.
Friends
For a group working the Calchaquí wine circuit, Colomé is both historical anchor and altitude extreme — and the Turrell museum adds a dimension no other bodega in Argentina offers.
- Plantings past 3,100 metres rank among Earth's highest, the thin air concentrating every berry.
- Nine permanent Turrell light rooms were built on site under the artist's supervision.
- The estate's vineyards are documented to 1831, the oldest working wine history in Argentina.
- Two hours of dirt track from Molinos keep the valley's silence structural.
Estate wines paired with lamb and goat, altitude in every glass.
Empanadas calchaquíes and regional cheeses on a terrace above the highest vines.
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