San Carlos IG

San Carlos is the department at the bottom of the Valle de Uco. On a label you'll mostly meet it through its smaller IGs, with Paraje Altamira and La Consulta the best known. The department is an IG in its own right too, so a bottle that says San Carlos draws on vineyards across the whole department.

The INV counted 8,691 hectares of vines here in 2016, spread over 673 vineyards. That was 31% of the Valle de Uco and 130% more than in the year 2000. The 2025 figure is 8,679.6 hectares, so the area has barely moved since. Malbec was 62% of the 2016 plantings, and the INV points out that San Carlos holds more Malbec than either of the other two departments in the valley.

The valley sits on the foothills of the Andes between 33 and 34 degrees south. Summer days are warm and the nights are very cold, with a daily swing of about 15°C, and frost and hail cost growers crops in some years. The INV describes the soils on the higher slopes as stony and poor, with cobbles mixed with coarse sand and some silt. The sub-IGs show how much that changes over a few kilometres. When I open a San Carlos Malbec I'm looking for the colour and fresh acidity that altitude should give, and for a label that names the vineyard or the sub-IG.