Cuyo (Central Andes) Food & Traditional Cuisine

Cuyo eats Argentine food with a strong Italian accent and drinks very well with it.

The asado is central here as everywhere in Argentina: beef, offal, chorizo and morcilla cooked slowly over wood embers, eaten over several hours. In Mendoza it is often done with the wine estate’s own bottles and, in the mountains, with goat instead of beef.

The Italian layer is unmistakable — fresh pasta, tuco sauce, cured meats, and a habit of Sunday family lunches that run into the evening. Many winemaking families came from Piedmont and the Veneto and brought their kitchens.

The desert contributes olive oil, which Mendoza and San Juan Province produce in quantity and increasingly well, along with preserved fruit — the orchards grow peaches, plums and quince, and the tradition of dulces and sun-dried fruit is strong.

And food here is designed around wine rather than the other way round; the bodega lunch is a genuine regional form.

Asado is the foundation, and in Mendoza the accompaniment is a Malbec from a few kilometres away. Chivito — kid goat, slow-roasted — is the mountain version and the regional speciality of Malargue.

Empanadas mendocinas, baked, with beef, onion, olive and hard-boiled egg, and a slightly sweeter pastry than the northwest’s.

Locro and carbonada, the latter a beef and vegetable stew with peaches or pumpkin, sometimes served in a hollowed squash.

Tomaticán, a simple summer stew of tomato, onion, egg and sometimes corn, which is a Cuyo home dish rather than a restaurant one.

Olives and olive oil from Maipu and San Rafael, often tasted alongside wine.

Also: humita in the husk; pastel de choclo, a sweetcorn-topped pie shared with Chile; and quince and sweet potato pastes eaten with cheese as vigilante.

The bodega lunch is the region’s defining food experience: a long midday meal at a winery, matched to their bottles, usually in a room looking at the vines and the Andes. The best ones are serious restaurants and book weeks ahead.

Mercado Central in Mendoza sells the region’s produce — olives, cured meat, cheese, dried fruit — and has stalls serving sandwiches and empanadas.

Bicycle wine tours in Maipu are a Mendoza institution: hire a bike, ride between bodegas and olive-oil producers on flat roads, and take it slowly. Doing it in the afternoon heat of January is a mistake people make once.

Sunday asado is a family occasion, and being invited to one is the best possible outcome of a visit.

Tap water in Mendoza is Andean snowmelt and excellent.

Siesta is genuinely observed — shops close from about one to five.

Cuyo is the reason Argentina is a wine country, and Mendoza alone produces around seventy per cent of the national output.

Malbec is the story. Brought from France in the 1850s, it declined almost to extinction in Cahors and Bordeaux after phylloxera and frost, and found in Mendoza the conditions it wanted: high altitude, intense sunlight, low humidity, and a wide day-to-night swing that gives colour and structure without losing freshness. The modern industry was rebuilt around it from the 1990s.

Altitude is the region’s signature. Vineyards run from about 700 metres up to over 1,500 in the Uco Valley, where the cold nights produce the most structured wines in the country. Alongside Malbec: Cabernet Franc, Bonarda, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, and Chardonnay and Semillon at the higher and cooler sites.

San Juan Province is hotter and lower, known for Syrah and for Torrontes, and produces a great deal of the country’s brandy and vermouth.

Hundreds of bodegas receive visitors; almost all require a booking, and the architecture at several Uco estates is worth the trip on its own.