This month’s Passport Club travels to South America for two dramatically different expressions of place. The 2024 Zuccardi Q Cabernet Sauvignon comes from Argentina’s high-elevation Uco Valley, where intense sunlight, cool nights, and rocky alluvial soils produce Cabernet Sauvignon with concentrated fruit and vibrant structure. De Martino Gallardía Old Vine White comes from Chile’s historic Itata Valley, where old, dry-farmed bush vines preserve a much older chapter of South American wine culture.
Zuccardi Q Cabernet Sauvignon reflects the modern transformation of Argentine wine. Fruit from selected high-altitude vineyards gives the wine ripe blackcurrant and red fruit, while the Uco Valley’s broad daily temperature swings help retain acidity, freshness, and aromatic definition.
Gallardía Old Vine White offers a striking contrast. Produced primarily from old-vine Muscat, with a smaller contribution from the locally rare Corinto grape, it is floral, mineral, lightly textured, and completely dry. The vines grow without irrigation in Itata’s granitic soils, connecting the wine to one of Chile’s oldest viticultural regions.
Together, these wines reveal the remarkable range of South American wine. One is a structured, high-altitude Cabernet from the Andes, while the other is a fragrant old-vine white rooted in the coastal hills of southern Chile. Both express a renewed emphasis on vineyard origins, regional identity, and freshness.
Club members can sample all four bottle club selections and pick up their wines at the pick up event on Tuesday, September 8th, 2026 or at Curio for the remainder of September.