Patagonia's Rio Negro Valley is the setting of this small but beautiful winery, 620 miles south of Buenos Aires in the middle of the desert. This is extreme winemaking, made possible by irrigation channels excavated by British colonists in the 1820’s. The climate is bone dry with just seven inches of rain each year.
Hans Vinding-Diers is the Danish, South African born, Bordeaux-trained winemaker at Noemia. Viticulture and vinification are fanatical. A green pruning is carried out in January leaving 10hl/ acre. Harvest around the first week of April is obviously by hand, as is de-stemming. Winemaking processes are necessarily simple given limited means but this has the advantage of limiting intervention. No sulphur is added to the must and two pigeages are performed per day. Fermentation lasts around three weeks at a temperature of circa 26ºC. After this the wine is decanted by gravity into French Radoux barrels of the tightest and finest grain possible.
Stylistically it is possible to see the influence Vinding-Diers’s Bordeaux elevage in a passion for subtlety and finesse in these wines. They have fine concentration, intense Malbec typicity and sparkling purity of fruit, but never at the expense of elegance.
