Here's what Argentina can achieve when the French take over

One of the best things to happen to literature in the 20th century was Jorge Luis Borges, who showed us how to intensify both thought and feeling into a little flash of light at the bottom of a wine glass. One of the worst things to

happen to literature was the rise of the two-inch-thick biography,

in which an interesting person is anatomised, catalogued, replayed and rewound until no interest remains. Alas Borges, who spent his life avoiding life, is now the subject of just such a book. The arrival of a definitive biography always means that other scholars are at work on the same material, determined to eclipse biography A with biography B, while biographers C and D badger literary editors for the chance to write a scathing review. No writer deserves more to remain an enigma than Borges. His matchbox-size fictions, crammed with the densest matter in the universe, provide you with all you need to know about both the man and the country where he was born.

So it seems to me, at least. But I am constantly encountering people who visit Argentina for reasons that have nothing to do with Borges. Some go there for the horses; some make a pilgrimage to those strange lost communities that speak Welsh, Breton or Basque and that dress in clothes which say no to FCUK; some go in search of Hitler or Goebbels, convinced that the entire Wehrmacht is still holed up in the hills; some go to drink the wine, which is cheap and plentiful. Some, like the two Lurton brothers, even go to make wine.

Born into a family of Bordeaux wine-growers, Jacques and Francois Lurton are determined to show that Argentinian

grapes, when disciplined by French methods, can produce wines

that have the quality of their European counterparts, but with added zip and zest from those dry sierras. Their Pinot Gris is a remarkable transplant, with apricot flavours and a crisp attack, lacking the mellow harmonies of the Alsatian version, but for that very reason able to offer a sharp rebuke to our plate of fatty bacon. The Bonarda is ripe and refreshing, full of sunlight, an excellent antidote to the thought of our waterlogged fields and lost harvests. We drank it with Sam the horse, snatching a last glimpse of summer through the veil of rain and tears.

The two Tierra del Fuego wines are blends, the red using Sangiovese, Bonarda and Malbec, the Chenin Blanc using Torrontes and Furmint. The idea of blending Italy, France,

Spain and Hungary reflects the evolution of Argentinian society,

populated over the past two centuries by members of every European elite. The wines themselves, however, have a fresh and easy-drinking quality that is more Argentinian than European, and they show just what Argentina can achieve when the French take over. Maybe they should take over the Falklands, too.

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