The fusion promised in this title is real, but it happens in the tank rather than in your mouth, and knowing which Argentine beers actually put grape and grain together is the useful part. Argentina brews mostly lager and brews a great deal of it, so the country's most interesting beer experiments come from an obvious place, which is that its agriculture is wine: brewers in Mendoza ferment with grape must, work beer in retired French oak that held red wine, and pitch wine yeast on purpose. Most writing on this subject spends its length on vineyard history under a headline about beer, which is the wrong way round.
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Argentina Is A Lager Country First
Quilmes is the name on most menus, a pale lager brewed in the town of Quilmes just south of Buenos Aires since 1888, when the German immigrant Otto Bemberg founded the brewery there. It was the largest in the country by 1920 and it still is, which tells you more about Argentine drinking than any tourism brochure. Bemberg was not a curiosity either, since German, Swiss and Austrian settlers brought lager brewing to several provinces, and Otto Schneider founded a brewery of his own in Santa Fe in 1912. The everyday order is a very cold, clean, lightly hopped lager, and fernet, the Italian bitter that Argentines drink cut with cola, tends to arrive after the beer.
The wine history this subject needs is one paragraph, not two chapters. Malbec comes from the south-west of France, where it was already grown around Cahors, and the French agronomist Michel Aimé Pouget is usually credited with carrying cuttings to Mendoza in 1853, at the prompting of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, then a provincial official there. That is half a century earlier than the late nineteenth century you will still read in some places. Argentina now grows more Malbec than any other country, and Mendoza province accounts for most of its wine, which is the whole background required to understand why a Mendoza brewer reaches for grapes.
Patagonia Is Where The Ale Tradition Lives
The town to know is San Carlos de Bariloche on Lago Nahuel Huapi, in Río Negro province, settled heavily by central European immigrants and still built around chocolate, trout and breweries. Local histories date Bariloche's first home-brewed beer to 1927, when Esteban Zufiaur and Juan Antonio Leberle made a batch called Parque Nacional, and Blest, which opened there in 1996, is generally credited as the country's first brewpub. Further south in the same province, El Bolsón has the stranger and better story: a German immigrant named Otto Tipp arrived in 1890, started what is believed to be the town's first brewery, and taught local growers to cultivate hops, which is why that town now runs a hop harvest festival every February.
The consequence is that describing Argentine craft beer as newly arrived is simply wrong, and older writing on the subject does it repeatedly. Patagonia had been brewing for eighty years before the first brewpub opened, and the modern scene is a later wave rather than a first one. The economic collapse of 2001 and 2002, which made imported goods scarce and expensive, gave the cervecerías artesanales a market they had not created for themselves, and by 2010 the Oxford Companion to Beer was counting around 70 microbreweries nationally. Buenos Aires then added the hop-forward end of the range through the 2010s, so the country now has an industrial lager base, a German-influenced Patagonian middle and a capital-city craft layer, which is a normal three-tier scene rather than an emerging one.
Where The Grape Goes Into The Beer
Mendoza is where the title of this article earns its keep. A handful of brewers there work in what is loosely called the grape ale manner, and the most documented is Chachingo, which puts grapes and grape juice into beer in every state available to it, whole clusters, freshly crushed must, finished wine, along with wine yeast, ageing in used French oak that previously held red wine, and a second fermentation in the bottle the way a sparkling wine maker does it. At the harvest they lean on cheap trellis varieties such as Criolla and Moscatel for colour and fruit, and one recent version was a six percent grape IPA built on Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir. Another spent a year on whole-cluster Cabernet Franc in ex-red-wine oak and a second year in bottle.
There is an industrial version of the same idea. Mendoza's wine economy produces concentrated grape must in very large volume, and in the mid-2000s a Mendoza brewery spent about a year developing a beer fermented on surplus grape concentrate rather than on barley alone, which is a genuinely local answer to a question nobody outside a wine region would think to ask.
What the fruit does to the beer is worth understanding before you order it, because it is not beer with juice added. Grape sugars are almost fully fermentable, so must thins the body and lifts alcohol while taking malt sweetness with it, the skins and stems contribute tannin and a peppery red-fruit note, and wine yeast brings its own aromatics on top. The result is drier and more wine-like than the beer it started as, which is why the good examples are drunk young, cold and with food in front of them.
The British Columbia Version Of The Same Idea
None of this is remote from a BC drinker, because the two regions share their geography in miniature. The dry interior east of the Coast Mountains and the Argentine side of the Andes around Mendoza are both rain-shadow countryside dependent on snowmelt irrigation, with hot days and cold nights that hold acidity in fruit, and in both places vineyards, orchards and breweries compete for the same land and the same barrels. That is why the Argentine trick has shown up here. A number of British Columbia breweries now ferment with grape must or with pomace, the skins and seeds left after pressing, and age the result in foeders and retired wine barrels, with one Abbotsford operation having released a long run of grape ales and others leaving a base beer on the skins for a week to draw out colour for a rosé-style beer.
The hop parallel runs the same way. El Bolsón's February harvest festival is celebrating a crop that is small, local and expensive next to bulk hops from the Yakima Valley, which is precisely the position the hop yards around Chilliwack and in the Southern Interior are in. If you want to taste the Mendoza idea without importing anything, ask a local brewery what it has on grape must and drink that while it is young.
Ordering Without Guessing
| If you want | Order | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The everyday default | Quilmes in a glass rather than a bucket | Cold, clean and what almost everyone else is drinking |
| The immigrant tradition | A Bariloche lager or dunkelweizen | Central European settlement is the strongest beer story in Patagonia |
| The local speciality | A Mendoza grape ale | The one style that could only come out of a wine economy |
| Something with char | A dry stout or porter | Roast malt and fat belong together |
| The barrel idea | A strong dark beer aged in wine oak | Retired French oak does what chips cannot |
Asado, And What To Drink With It
Argentine cooking runs on beef, and the pairing logic for beer is not the one on the wine list. A ribeye with coarse salt wants carbonation and bitterness to cut the fat, which is what a German-style lager and a dry stout both do well, and what a low-alcohol wheat beer does less well. Chimichurri carries vinegar, garlic and oregano, so it is already doing the cutting work that a bitter beer would only repeat, which argues for something cleaner and colder alongside it. Empanadas are saltier and fattier again, and a softer, fruitier hazy IPA or a grape ale works there, because a little sweetness and tannin match the pastry. For the alfajor at the end, dulce de leche between two biscuits, the honest answer is that coffee improves it more than any beer will, though a milk stout is a respectable second choice.
One warning about service, which matters more than the ordering. Beer in Argentina is poured very cold in a country that is not trying to make you taste the beer, so a Patagonian ale or a barrel-aged stout will arrive at a temperature that mutes it. Ask for it in a glass, keep it out of the ice, and give it five minutes before the first sip.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do grape ales taste sweet?
Usually the opposite, which surprises people. Grape sugars ferment out very completely, so a beer built on must finishes dry and thin unless the brewer stops the ferment or adds sweetness back, and the fruit character you notice in the glass is mostly aroma from the skins plus whatever wine was blended in at the end. A grape ale is closer in structure to a dry white wine than to a fruit beer, and that dryness is the reason brewers put them next to food.
Does Argentina really drink more wine than beer?
That is the reputation and it is partly earned, since Malbec is the export and the identity and wine is what the country argues about, but it is not a dependable description of any individual glass. Nobody has published a figure on relative drinking that is worth printing here, so the useful planning fact is simpler: wine is the drink with prestige attached and beer is the drink with a pizza attached, and both are on almost any table.
Can I buy Argentine beer in British Columbia?
Sporadically at best, and not reliably enough to plan a meal around. Argentine beer is brewed overwhelmingly for its own domestic market, the exported volume is small next to the wine trade, and what does arrive tends to surface in restaurant channels rather than on a liquor store shelf. The style is easy to find locally in any case, since the grape-ale idea has crossed the Pacific already, so track down a BC brewer working on must rather than hunting for an import.
Keep The Fusion, Drop The Wine History
Argentina does not need a wine article wearing a beer headline, and it does not need the fusion pitch removed either, because the overlap is genuinely there in Mendoza's tanks and now in British Columbia ones. Order the cold lager with the pizza, save the barrel-aged stout for after the asado, drink the grape ale young with something fatty, and let the Malbec go to the people arguing about it. That is a beer country worth taking seriously, and it is a much shorter story than the one the vineyards would have told.
