It was the last day of the torrontés harvest, and when Etchart's winemaker, José Luis Mounier, rushed me to the vineyards, the pickers were literally running crates filled with golden-green grapes to an idling truck. While torrontés doesn't provide the most respected wine of the region, it's what the wineries rely on and what the locals drink. It's easy to see the attraction: light and flowery, torrontés is filled with easy, pretty white peach flavor. But Mounier's red wines turned out to be more interesting.
  Back at the winery, he poured me a juicy, fresh cabernet and a smooth, suave malbec-cabernet blend, the Arnaldo Etchart, both from '98, as well as samples of experimental pinot noir, syrah, cabernet franc and tannat. While he admitted that Salta isn't exactly pinot heaven, the syrah was promising, with more fruit and spice than you'd expect to get from six-year-old vines. And the tannat! I was expecting something as bitter, hard and tannic as three-day-old tea, the way it often is in Southwest France. Instead it was floral, plummy, tannic yet juicy as a fist-full of blueberries. I wondered if tannat might prove to be the next Argentine malbec, another French variety performing better here than there.
  At five the next morning every dog in the village gathered outside my back window for a group howl, launching me from sleep. Immediately my room's captive mosquitos started clamoring for skin. I got out of there as soon as I could, and as the sun rose, the day improved; by lunch I was digging into a steak topped with an egg fried sunny-side up, yolk still runny, corn on the cob and hot pappas fritas on the patio at Bodegas Lavaque. Their torrontés had more body and less bitterness than any other I tasted, while their cabernet reminded me of a Bordeaux: lean, lithe and firm. While workmen buzzed about, Sebasti‡n Saravia, the winemaker, explained that Lavaque had recently sold one of its properties to Pe–aflor, the largest winery in Argentina. Now they'd turned their attention to refurbishing the houses and planning a new winery for this estate. It's clear that they have big plans for it.
  After lunch, Flora and Truc, two big white dogs, jumped into the flatbed and we drove over to Bodegas Nanni, a tiny old place right in town where José Eduardo Nanni is making organic wines. This was something new: Argentine winemakers love to tell you how few pesticides, herbicides and such they use, but I couldn't remember ever seeing an Argentine wine with organic certification. So while Truc held a cat hostage under a stainless steel tank, Nanni poured us his torrontés and another good, lean cabernet. He pointed out the door to a bald, blood-red streak of rock far across the valley, on the other side of the Rio Calchaqui. "Under there, that's where my vineyards are. There's not much plantable land because it's stony and there's a fierce breeze, but that's why it's possible to grow the grapes organically." Later, I found out that Santa Julia in Mendoza is pursuing organic certification, too; a good sign in a country that once valued speed, ease and quantity over quality.
  Location was the focus at Domingo Hermanos, too, a family-run place on the edge of town. "Our winery isn't really our strong point," the winemaker, Osvaldo Domingo, explained. "It's the vineyards that are special." We drove to Yacochuya, a place the French consultant Michel Rolland had mentioned to me a couple of years ago when I met him in Mendoza. I remember him saying, "If ever you get the chance, you must go there."
  There was plenty to be jazzed about in this remote area, a thirty minute drive north and west into the hills where the soil gets rocky and the trees are mostly the short, hardy, red-wooded algorollos. There are terraces left over from when the Diguitas, the local Indios, planted quinoa, colored corn, aji, peppers and the like; Domingo plans to restore them for grape vines. A crew was already working on redirecting the stream to the vineyards, hauling rocks on their shoulders and on stretchers made of sticks. Though Domingo hopes to have a winery here someday, he emphasized that they don't have the money or the aspiration to produce blockbuster wines. "We're just a family winery, and that's what we want to stay. It's places like this that make it special."
  Yet before I left, he offered me a taste from a big blue synthetic barrel stored outside. It turned out to be this violently purple juice, fabulously deep, dark, rich, tannic, acidic, fresh Ñ everything all in the right proportion. "Just a little prueba," he said, rightly proud. "We picked some grapes at fourteen degrees alcohol at 2,300 feet, stomped them, and let them go. No sulfur, no yeast, nada." It was undeniably delicious, a tantalizing hint of what these northern vineyards may someday produce.

I had been reluctant to hire a driver to get to the next appointment, but after two pitch-black hours along the sinuous, dirt Routa Nacional 40, I couldn't have been more thankful that I had.
  I reached Molinos at 9:30 pm and dropped, exhausted, into bed. The next morning Roberto Barraza picked me up and we navigated another two hours of dusty trails to Cachi, a tiny puebla and the home of Colomé, a 150-year old winery. Over the years Colomé had fallen into disrepair, but this past February Donald Hess (of California's Hess Collection) purchased it and appointed Barraza to oversee restoration of the cane-roofed adobe buildings Ñ as well as the old, gnarly vines with their tiny clusters of delicious, small-berried malbec.
  When Hess bought Colomé, he also purchased a large chunk of a 8,300-foot-high plateau another hour and a half away, in the true middle of nowhere. He says he found it with a divining rod. I don't know how else he could have; certainly no one else has ever made wine there. Around the plateau there's nothing for miles, save for an occasional llama and the snow-capped Nevado de Cachi, a 22,344-foot peak that shoots icy breezes down and across the wind-torn scrub at up to 50 miles per hour. Nevertheless, Hess had a reservoir dug and installed 50 hectares of irrigation, frost protection and malbec, cabernet and merlot vines. It's hard to know if the plan is inspired or insane.
  I had plenty of time to contemplate that question as we headed back to the Salta city airport. Fingers of fog were creeping up and over the mountains, slowing us to a crawl and nearly causing a collision with a bus. Even the gauchos on their mules pulled off the road. All that was visible in any direction was llamas in silhouette.
  Though I'd come to Cafayate to explore torrontés, I'd begun to feel that red wines are actually the future of the region. Torrontés is a great grape to eat, but in wine it has a bitter streak that's hard to control. When I talked to Catena's brilliant viticulturist, Pedro Marchevsky about it, he explained that torrontés's high level of phenolics, the very components that make the grape so wonderfully fragrant, create that bitterness. To avoid it, a winemaker has to be exceptionally careful when handling the grapes and cleaning the must. And without a demand for top-level torrontés, there's little incentive for the extra effort. Demand is rising for Argentina's red wines, however, and much is being invested in them. In Salta, malbec and cabernet are the stalwarts, having grown here for over a century, and the lean, sophisticated style that is coming from Cafayate's climate could give Mendoza a run for its money. Tannat has been here for years, too, but only recently have winemakers taken a serious look at what deep, delicious wines it can make. Trials of syrah show promise, while plantings of pinot noir, cabernet franc and merlot are too new to know how well they will do. Add exploration into virgin and neglected areas, and Salta's future is wide open as the road was under the clouds.