Adrianna Vineyard Vinos de Parcela – South America’s Grand Cru. Laura Catena says that finding a site like Adrianna or La Tache or Lafite is like finding gold. It’s a combination of research, historic knowledge and luck. When Nicolás Catena Zapata found the Adrianna site, it was because he was looking for the coolest climate in Mendoza, for the limit of vine cultivation.
He was looking to make balanced, elegant and age-worthy wines. He was told that he was crazy, that grapes would never ripen there, but they did and beautifully. When the vineyard was first planted in 1992, Nicolás had some doubts: during the early plantings, there was a severe winter storm that buried the whole area. There was so much snow that nobody could drive through the roads.
But the magic at Adrianna goes beyond the cool climate. Adrianna Vineyard is at the site of a dried river bed, the stony, limestone soils are well drained and the extreme high altitude (5,000 feet elevation) provides the ideal amount of sunlight and cold. Nicolás Catena thinks that finding the Adrianna Vineyard was more luck than anything else.