Mendoza

The Andes stand white-capped and fifty kilometres away at the end of every straight road, a wall of peaks visible from the café table where you sit drinking something that was grown in their shadow six months ago. Mendoza city in the Cuyo region is the capital of Argentine wine, and the Malbec grape that prospers at its altitude — between 600 and 1,200 metres — produces wines that have spent thirty years redirecting the world's attention from Bordeaux and Napa. The evening along Arístides Villanueva, with its restaurant terraces and wine bars open to the warm night, gives no indication that this city was completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1861 and rebuilt from scratch.

Mendoza Province produces around 70% of Argentina's wine, with the Luján de Cuyo and Valle de Uco sub-regions recognised among the world's premier Malbec-producing zones. The city itself was founded in 1561 and rebuilt after the 1861 earthquake on a grid plan that allocated twenty percent of its area to parks and plazas — a civic decision that makes it one of the greenest cities in Argentina. The acequia system of open-water channels running alongside Mendoza's tree-lined streets is a working pre-Columbian irrigation network that still delivers meltwater from the Andes to the city's trees. The Aconcagua, at 6,961 metres the highest peak outside Asia, is a five-hour drive into the mountains directly above the city.