Michelini i Mufatto

Michelini i Mufatto is a family winery founded in the early 2000s in Gualtallary, in the northern reaches of Argentina’s Uco Valley — one of the highest, most demanding corners of Mendoza wine country. Gerardo Michelini runs it with his wife, Andrea Mufatto, and their son Manu. Home is Agrícola La Cautiva, a 5.5-hectare vineyard set at 1,550 meters in the foothills of the Andes, where the growing season runs long and cold and the soils are thin granite and limestone. It shows in the wines: taut, dry, mineral-driven.

Gualtallary wasn’t always considered prime ground for wine, and Gerardo Michelini helped change that. Years before he and Andrea started this winery, Gerardo helped found Zorzal alongside his brothers Juan Pablo and Matias, planting among the first vineyards at this altitude. Their wines — leaner and fresher than the big, ripe Malbecs Argentina had built its reputation on — drew attention to the region and helped establish Gualtallary as one of the country’s most closely watched high-altitude sites.

Gerardo comes from a family whose surname carries real weight in Argentine wine; his brothers have each built their own reputations across Mendoza. But his own route there wasn’t direct. Trained as an architect and later working as a banker in Mallorca, he came to wine almost by accident, drawn in through people he met along the way. Andrea, his wife, brings a precise, exacting eye to the cellar, and their son Manu — who has worked harvests in Europe — represents the next generation, blending new ideas with the family’s established instincts.

The vineyard is farmed organically and divided by soil type, so they vinify each parcel separately. One plot, La Cuni, covers barely half a hectare. Everything ferments in concrete, then ages in used barrels and large foudres—old wood chosen to shape the wine without covering it up. The whites come from vines few growers in Mendoza can match: Certezas is Semillon from a 120-year-old vineyard, one of the oldest left in the province, and Propósitos is Chenin Blanc from a pergola-trained vineyard planted in 1970.

The family also makes wine in Bierzo, Spain, extending the same restless curiosity that took Gerardo from architecture to banking to some of Argentina’s most talked-about vineyards.