Laura Catena, Managing Director of Catena Zapata
A family reaching for the top of the wine world.
Arguable the face of Argentine wines, Laura Catena likes to recall a story she has told countless times of how an event that took place in 1955 changed her life and the story of South American wines.
It was during Wine Spectator’s New York Wine Experience, where winetasters gather every year to savor some of the best wines in the world. Catena, who was chosen by her father to act for the venerable family business at the event, stood at a stand that showcased one of her family’s and Argentina’s best wines. It was the first time a brand from a South American country had been invited to the famous event.
She vividly describes how winetasters from the public would flock to French and Italian wines, but rarely deigned to try the Argentine wines of her father. The Catena family, one of South America’s most well-known wine families, had a historic tradition of making great wines since 1902, but at that famous Manhattan event, for the throngs of winetasters, it didn’t matter.
“I watched long lines at the French and Italian producers’ tables,” Catena says. “I got one person every 10 minutes. Some just came up to spit in my bucket. My father was king in Argentina, but outside, they didn’t even know the country makes wine. I called my dad and said, ‘I’m going to have to come help you.’”
She acknowledges she was a bit surly in saying that to her father, but since then, Laura Catena, 53, who is a Stanford grad in medicine, became an emergency medicine doctor and is now the author of several books on wines, undertook a mission in life: to position her family’s wines among the best in the world. So far, many wine experts from all over agree that the mother of three may well accomplish that and more.
A super-charged overachiever who favors the Socratic method and is keen on listening and asking questions, Catena, who lives between San Francisco and Argentina, in the Mendoza region known for producing wine, still finds a way to have a positive attitude and a quick smile. Sure, everyone still considers upper crust French and Italian wines as some of the finest, but Catena, her family and the 400 staffers of the company have found a way to enable their wines to stand with the most exclusive wines on Earth by following their creed, which she recites: “the most important thing is, are we making Argentine wines that can stand with the best in the world?”
A drink dates back to Ancient Rome
At the crux of Catena Zapata’s wine history is Malbec, a wine that dates back to the Middle Ages and to Ancient Rome, when the Caesars expanded their empire and ruled most of the civilized world. The family has doubled down on this wine and will accept nothing less than to return the grape to its ancient glory and take it beyond.
At one time, the Malbec grape - gorgeous, aromatic, smooth and concentrated - was a staple of French wines. The Malbec-Cabernet blends that once defined Bordeaux have been lost, but now live on in Argentina, Catena says.
“I think Malbec has a kind of smoothness comparable to Pinot Noir. It’s why in the old French texts they say that Cabernet Sauvignon needs to be always blended with Malbec,” Catena says.
Malbec and other wines of the Catena family are now truly an Argentine tradition. But before the family was able to place these wines in the upper echelons of the wine realm, it had to travel a long, winding road.
Wine runs in the family
Laura Catena belongs to the fourth generation of her family to enter into the wine business. Nicola Catena, her great-grandfather, migrated from Italy to Argentina. In 1902 the first vines were planted in Mendoza, starting a business that included not only wines, but also olive oil and other agricultural ventures.
Domingo, Nicola’s son, continued the family business by becoming a producer, shipping Catena wines in big oak barriques to Buenos Aires, where the largest part of the country’s population and wine drinkers lived. At first the Catenas had other distributors, but in time they were able to deliver their brand under the family name.
Nicolás, Domingo’s son, was more of an intellectual who was a big believer that his country could in time become more of a world-class player, Laura Catena says. But in the 1970s, with the rule of a military government and the Malvinas War, Nicolás decided things had become dangerous in his nation and moved his family to the United States.
Nicolás began to teach economics at UC Berkeley, while Laura dove headfirst into American life, finishing high school in California in the 1980s. Located in Berkeley, Nicolás was close to the Napa winemakers who in 1976 were able to roundly defeat Bordeaux producers at the prestigious Judgment of Paris wine competition; this inspired the elder Catena into believing that his wines could stand with the greatest of theirs.
The family eventually returned to Argentina, bringing with them new technology and equipment, having visiting winemakers like Alberto Antonini, Paul Hobbs and Jacques Lurton. In the meantime, Laura graduated from Harvard in 1988, followed by Stanford medical school, and became an emergency
room physician in the San Francisco region. After a trip to France in which one of their wines was compared to a common French wine, considered an offense, Nicolás and Laura knew they had to step up their game in the wine business. The family found some colder climate vineyards in the Andean foothills at the Uco Valley region.
The move took the Argentine Malbec to new heights, both literally and figuratively. With the help of local, complex but natural canal irrigation constructed centuries before by the Huarpe Indians, the latest scientific studies and plain, hard agricultural work, Catena was able to produce great wine using the unique local soil.
“That was his high-altitude revolution,” says Catena. “He went places no one had gone before—and proved he could make aromatic, elegant wine with natural acidity.”
A doctor in the vineyards
Like her father, at first, Laura Catena was not entirely convinced that she would become a winemaker. After all, there was her medical career as a pediatric emergency doctor.
But events like her trips to France with her father and Wine Spectator’s New York Wine Experience event in 1995 changed her mind. Until this day, she mentions, the fact that she was a physician actually helped her become a better winemaker and vice versa.
“I was actually trained as a doctor. I thought I was going to spend my life drinking the family’s wines, not making them,” she says.
For 25 years she lived with “these two loves,” she says. It dawned on her that one thing benefitted the other, giving the example that physicians often mount upon a high horse and lack customer service, mostly talking down to patients, instead of listening to them.
“It could be that the doctor identifies a certain medical problem, but the problem that really matters to that patient may be another one. That’s important,” Catena says. “To cure someone, the patient has to feel loved and cared for. If the physician does not listen and only gives orders, how will the patient be able to heal?”
Once Laura Catena decided to dive headfirst into the family business, she did it the way she approaches everything - with passion. Having a scientific background, she knew it was important to the business to incorporate study after study on Malbec wines and the way the intricate soil of high altitudes affected the vineyards.
“The studies depicted how the soil differed from one area to another, making it ideal to cultivate a wine that could be far different from another in just a neighboring vineyard. The studies revealed that everything mattered, from the sun to the soil and even the local microbes and how they contributed to making even better terroir and better wine”, she says.
Putting Argentine wine on the map...and on top
During the last decades, Catena’s wines have garnered multiple recognitions and awards, going head-to-head with the most exclusive wines in the hemisphere. From Robert Parker’s “Best of the Best,” to multiple 100-point wines, to the Drinks International 2020 Award for being the “Number 1 Most Ad- mired Wine Brand in the World,” there’s no question the trademark is on a roll.
And Laura Catena is receiving some help from the rest of her family, including her little sister, Adrianna, a historian with an Oxford PhD who is helping promote the brand by showing how women across the ages have
been instrumental in bringing Malbec wines into the modern age. Her historical designs were used to adorn the bottles which have become a hit.
“History is a passion, one that connects a lot with wine,” Adrianna Catena says.
Catena Zapata has accomplished much, many industry experts agree. But for the Catena family, they say that despite their long history, this is just the beginning.
“We got this love for the land and this vision from my Italian great-grandfather who came to Argentina with a dream,” says Laura Catena. “This dream is still alive in our family. There is still so much work to do. We never feel finished - and that is actually a big part of the fun.”