Adrianna Catena: Challenging colonial-era thinking in wine

Back in 1991, when my mother first presented our wines in New York City, she received – when granted an appointment – a simple reply: ‘For your wines to sell at $20 they should be as good as a $40 California wine.’

Fair enough. The world didn’t know us. Stubborn lady that she (still) is, she made them taste the wine. The rest, to some extent, is history.

If I had any misgivings about the quality of those early cuvées, they evaporated last Sunday when I opened a bottle of Catena Chardonnay from 2003. It was a beauty I might easily compare to old Tondonia Rioja Blanco (a personal favourite).

More than 30 years have passed – and a neat half-century since the Judgement of Paris. The wine world has been through DRAMA. Statistics and movements aside, it has grown huge and different: more diverse, more colourful and endlessly exciting.

These are also scary times: free-falling consumption, tax bombs, pests and wildfires – the ravages of climate change, our plagues of Exodus.

And yet the Global South continues to be viewed through the aristocratic lens of taste and power. We’re still rowing, as Argentines say, in dulce de leche (or wading through treacle as you would say in the UK).

As a South American woman in wine and a former academic, I have reason, far too often, to roll my eyes at a world that still lives and breathes in colonial terms – in language, image and spirit.

Two worlds (of wine and academia), both taking small, tentative steps, to decolonise themselves. Both, I won’t be alone in saying, not doing nearly enough.

A lot has been said of Eurocentrism in academia, as in wine. A brief, personal view then, of where we stand, the challenges, and what might be the way forward, towards a more inclusive, fair environment.

At its most basic, Eurocentrism is the worldview that assumes European culture, history, values and experiences as central, normative, or inherently superior – judging all other cultures by comparison to the mothership.

Edward Said, author of the groundbreaking 1978 book Orientalism, gave us a sense, later termed ‘the colonial gaze’, of its form and implications – the non-Western world is backward, child to its European father, imitative and inferior.

In the wine world, this might manifest as:

• A shelf at the store for ‘New World’ wines; separate shelves for any European country.
• A UK charity auction listing European countries alphabetically and South America at the end, with Argentina illogically last.
• A section at an international fair (which many South American producers can barely afford to attend), only to be lumped together under the banner of New World, at the far end, unreachable to any who lack the energy to walk through Croatia or Georgia.
• An article published in a respected magazine, ostensibly about Argentina, but somehow focused on the guiding star of Spanish winemakers.
• The glaring absence of South America from publications, wine lists, gatherings and associations that purport to champion the underdog, the small producer, the young and exciting.
• The continued use of languages of empire in wine courses far and wide, references for taste and scent familiar only to those who live in the West, bar the Asian reference owed to gastronomy and geopolitical power.

It’s August 2026. I’m in Buenos Aires at a blind tasting organised by Paz Levinson, an intimate gathering; 34 wines, most of them new projects, first vintages still unreleased.

The variety, and quality, is stunning. What stands out is the creativity, the fearlessness, the will to innovate and explore.

Many have struggled to find a UK importer, for varied and complex reasons. But I’d like to sit at London’s latest hot restaurant sometime next spring and have the happy surprise of finding one (or two, or three), on the wine list. It’s about time.

In my glass this month

I’m in Jujuy right now and drinking a gorgeous Criolla Quebradeña, the Sacha Tigre 2025 by local producer Bodega Kindgard.

Tiny production from old pergola- trained vines and a local Criolla variety. Winemaker Diana ‘La Tana’ Bellincioni also works at the Cielo Arriba project, another gem in this area, spearheaded by Alejandro Sejanovich and Jeff Mausbach.

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