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Administrative area · Argentina

San Juan

Argentina’s second largest wine province, hotter and lower than Mendoza, and its principal source of Syrah.

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What to expect in the glass

Full-bodied, ripe, warm reds — Syrah with black fruit and spice, and generous soft Malbec. High alcohol, low acidity.

About San Juan

San Juan lies north of Mendoza and is hotter, drier and lower, with vineyards mostly between 600 and 1,200 m.

It is Argentina’s second largest wine province by volume and has long produced a great deal of inexpensive wine, alongside grape concentrate and vermouth base.

Syrah is its most successful serious variety, ripening fully in conditions that suit it.

San Juan is a administrative area, not an appellation

No authority delimits this name or attaches rules to it. A political unit — an Italian region, an English county, a US county — used as a wine area because that is how the industry and its readers talk about it, not because a wine authority delimited it. That does not make it less real or less useful — it means nothing legal follows from it, and you will not generally find it on a label as a controlled designation.

Grapes

Wines from here

red

Argentine Malbec

Mendoza’s velvet-textured, violet-scented red — soft, generous and the wine that made Malbec international.

What to eat, and how to serve it

Derived from this region’s signature styles. Each is listed separately, because a region does not have one serving temperature.

Argentine Malbec

Serve at 16–18°C (cool room temperature).

Try with steak, steak with chimichurri or steak and ale pie.

Where to go next

Places worth trying if you like this one — neighbours, rivals, and the obvious step across.

  • Mendoza — Argentina’s dominant wine province, growing Malbec at altitude in the rain shadow of the Andes.
  • Salta — Northern Argentina, home to some of the world’s highest vineyards and to intense Torrontés.

Sources

Sources consulted