Bodega DiamAndes

Since 2017 at the high station

The cellar work begins with gravity, not force. Ramiro Balliro, winemaker at Bodega DiamAndes in Tunuyán, works the estate fruit at 1000m in the Uco Valley, where the Andes sit close enough to govern the day. Born in San Martín, Mendoza, he studied in the province before training in wineries in the United States, Spain and France. At DiamAndes he has led winemaking since 2017, holding a station shaped by two disciplines: the Bonnie family’s Bordeaux perspective and the Argentine team’s work with high-altitude viticulture.

Alfred-Alexandre Bonnie and Michèle Bonnie established the estate in 2005 after developing Château Malartic-Lagravière and Château Gazin Rocquencourt. Their project joined Clos de los Siete with a Bordeaux habit of proportion, structure and cellar patience. Balliro’s role is not to make Mendoza speak with a borrowed accent. It is to keep the altitude, the fruit and the house grammar in tension, then let the blend resolve without losing its line.

A gravity cellar for mountain fruit

Bodega DiamAndes works from a 130 hectare estate planted to Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, Viognier and Chardonnay. The program is sustainable, with organic practice named as part of the house method, and the wines move across still red, white and rosé. The building, designed by Bórmida & Yanzón, is a gravity-flow winery, a practical choice as much as an architectural one: fruit can travel through the process with less pumping, and the cellar can ask for restraint from the machinery as well as from the hand.

The estate’s circular barrel cellar gives the work a center of gravity. Barrels gather around the room rather than disappearing into rows, and the bottle-aging crypt below extends the same idea into another register of time. No fermentation protocol or barrel regime is published by the house, so the clearest reading comes from the material facts it does state: altitude, estate scale, varieties, sustainable farming and a cellar built to move wine by gravity. Those are not decorative details. They are decisions made before the first tasting glass is poured.

The cellar under the Andes

The room is quiet, and the architecture keeps drawing the eye back outside. Panoramic mountain views sit beyond the glass, but the cellar does not behave like a viewing platform; it holds its own discipline. Concrete, curve, barrel and shadow do the work of slowing the visitor down. In the tasting room, the polish is measured rather than theatrical, with the Andes present as pressure, light and weather rather than as backdrop.

DiamAndes is ranked 39 among The World’s 50 Best Vineyards, recognition attached to this house in Tunuyán, not borrowed from the Bonnie family’s Bordeaux estates. Balliro also teaches emerging oenologists in the Uco Valley, which gives the bench here a second life beyond the vintage. The lesson remains close to the place: gravity through the winery, altitude over the vines, and the circular barrel cellar at Bodega DiamAndes.