Cuyo is desert that was made to bloom. The provinces of Mendoza, San Juan, San Luis and La Rioja sit in the rain shadow of the highest Andes, getting almost no rainfall, and every vine in them is watered by snowmelt through irrigation channels the Huarpe people dug before the Spanish arrived. The result is the most productive wine region in South America against a wall of six-thousand-metre peaks.
Mendoza is the capital of it — a city of plane trees and acequias with several hundred bodegas within an hour's drive, and the staging post for Aconcagua, at 6,961 metres the highest mountain outside Asia. San Rafael, three hours south, is the quieter wine town and the gateway to the Atuel canyon.
Further north the landscape gets stranger. Talampaya in La Rioja is a canyon of red sandstone walls 150 metres high, and together with Ischigualasto over the San Juan border it holds one of the most complete fossil records of the Triassic anywhere on earth — the rocks where the first dinosaurs turn up.
It is dry, sunny and hot in summer, and the wine harvest in March is when Mendoza is at its best and most crowded.
