Drama escalated this week in the petrostate of Azerbaijian, as China and India joined poor countries confronting reluctant leaders of the United States and European nations demanding a trillion dollars in climate change mitigation investments. As the UN’s climate summit, COP 29, unfolded there in Baku, the world’s G-20 leaders gathered in Brazil, where a warming planet Earth was also in sharp focus.
President Joe Biden became the first U.S. President to visit the Amazon, pledging millions to boost the biodiversity of the region, telling reporters in Manaus “our forests and national wonders are the heart and soul of the world,” and signing a declaration that every November 17th would be known as International Conservation Day.
Planting as if your life depended on it
At the same time, to the south of Brazil, in the Argentine province of Mendoza, people living real lives with little or no voice in international climate policy gathered to talk about what it all meant for one of humanity’s oldest and most loved agricultural endeavors, winemaking.
Dr. Laura Catena is a daughter of this region, considered the capital of Malbec, now the managing director of Catena-Zapata Wines and founder and owner of Luca Wines. “In Argentina wine is considered food. It is the national beverage of Argentina.”
As we walked through dust and rocks, among the beautiful vines and occasional wandering dogs of a 4,600-foot elevation vineyard, Catena told me “wine and culture are one and the same thing. In Mendoza, if you walk up to anybody and ask them, every person knows at least 10 people connected with the wine business. Many of the people who work at our winery have their own little vineyard and they make their own wine.”
In an initiative made possible through the classic collaboration of private business and Mendoza’s Cuyo National University, the Catena Institute of Wine was a primary energy in drawing the International Terroir Congress this week to meet for the first time since 1996 in South America. Argentina ranks behind larger more developed wine economies, like France, Italy, Spain, and the United States, yet it has proven itself, in a good year, to be a wine-producing powerhouse. Argentina’s wine exports generated around $844 million (USD) in 2021. The national product’s advocacy group, Wines of Argentina, estimates that, of that almost one billion dollars, roughly two thirds came from the virtuoso region of Mendoza, famous for its high-altitude vineyards and the unique Malbec grapes harvested there.
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