The Culture of Wine: Uruguay

I first became fascinated by Uruguay during the 1986 World Cup. They played Scotland in one of the opening fixtures; they had a player sent off after two minutes, and the game finished 0-0. It was a thuggish, brutal, cynical performance that had Scottish players jumping over advertising hoardings to avoid injury. I was only nine at the time, but I instinctively knew that Uruguay had to be a crazy nation to out-fight Scotland.

In Uruguay there is a national trait called La Garra Charrúa, describing a combative spirit which takes on whomever a Uruguayan comes up against, and that was in evidence in the game against Scotland. It’s necessary, because Uruguay is a small country of around 3m people, sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil: if it weren’t for Uruguay’s fighting spirit, the country would be overwhelmed by its bigger, more powerful neighbours. That’s why Uruguay was created in 1828, to act as a buffer between the two other countries, a small, but significant barrier.

After the 1986 World Cup, I started reading more about football history, which the small nation of Uruguay is at the centre of. I learnt that they had won Olympic gold medals in 1924 and 1928, which is why they hosted the first World Cup in 1930—which they won. And that in 1950 they had broken the Brazilian psyche by winning the World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, which Brazil had believed they were destined to win. The defeat to Uruguay still haunts Brazilian football.

All of this meant I had to visit Uruguay on a trip to South America in 2016. It did not disappoint. I asked a simple question about the Uruguayan personality in a wine bar. Three hours later, the question was still being discussed by everyone in the bar: Uruguay punches above its weight, Uruguay doesn’t realise how great it is, Uruguay is insignificant, Uruguay needs to know its place, Uruguay is the greatest country in the world but how to persuade the rest of the world of this indisputable truth?

And the next night, the discussion began again with locals and visitors all chiming in about what it means to be Uruguayan. Montevideo was the main port of Spanish America—Buenos Aires is too far inland to easily navigate—and it still has that international feel of a city where people pass through on business but also have a strong connection to. Students in Buenos Aires get the ferry to Montevideo and back again, in order to renew their visas.

The main grape variety planted is Tannat, Uruguay’s answer to Argentina’s Malbec. It has big leaves and thick skins, which is ideal for Uruguay’s maritime climate, similar to Bordeaux’s. Like Chile and Argentina, grape cuttings came with immigrants from south-west France. If Uruguay is known for wine, it is for Tannat, but that doesn’t produce the highest-quality wines in the country. For red wines, it’s Merlot but that’s not fashionable internationally and it’s hard to promote a small country like Uruguay through Merlot. Like Galicia on the other side of the Atlantic, Albariño is excellent. But the question we debated in the bar was how to educate consumers about these wines when there are other more famous regions making similar wines already?

For all its combative spirit, Uruguay remains an underdog, promoting its wines through Tannat but really wanting to talk about Merlot. There are lots of paradoxes in this small, irresistible country: when we flew out from Montevideo, my wife simply said, I have no idea why we went to Uruguay, but it was amazing.