Will Bonner’s Brush With Death in the Andes – Part I

Colin’s note: Today is Thanksgiving, a market holiday. In lieu of our normal edition of The Bleeding Edge, we have something special for subscribers.

You’ll hear from Will Bonner about the time he found himself caught in a flash flood in a remote valley high in the Andes Mountains of Argentina.

He was there with his father, newsletter industry legend and Legacy Research co-founder Bill Bonner. They were there tending to their ranch where they grow the grapes for the high-altitude wines their wine club is known for… when the flood waters came.

To my American readers, I’d like to extend a Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. I’m grateful that you’ve chosen to come on this journey of discovering the bleeding edge of technology.

If you have a penchant for fine wines and are curious about the Bonners’ wine club, you can go here to find out more. Then read on for part one of Will’s perilous tale…

Suddenly, it was pitch black…

The truck’s headlights had plunged under the roaring water.

I began to feel the front wheels lift up as the truck slowly turned with the current of the gushing floodwater…

The woman in the seat next to me screamed. In the back, our ranch hand, Gustavo, began praying in Spanish to the Virgin Mary.

And I began to question the wisdom of traveling 5,000 miles by plane… another 500 miles in a smaller plane… and then taking a six-hour off-road trek on the one day a year it rains in northwestern Argentina…

…all to find a single bottle of dark red wine – so opaque it’s known as “black wine” – grown at extreme altitudes above 8,000 feet… in a valley so remote, only a Bonner would ever go there.

A hidden valley at over 8,000 feet

But I’m getting ahead of myself… Let’s start at the beginning…

A Life-Changing Discovery

I first arrived in Argentina in 2006, when I moved my family to Buenos Aires.

It was around the same time that my father, Legacy Research co-founder Bill Bonner, bought an isolated ranch in the Andean foothills in the northwest of the country.

As it turned out, the ranch was far too remote and dry to sustain itself purely on cattle or farming.

Bill Bonner with his cattle

But riding across the property one day, we came to a small valley fed by a thin trickle of water snaking its way down from the mountains…

And there, gnarled and overgrown, we discovered a long-forgotten vineyard of Malbec grapes. The previous ranch owner had planted them as an experiment…

What we had discovered, right there on our ranch, was one of the highest-altitude vineyards in the world… at over 8,400 feet…

…and a remote wine region unlike any other.

When I popped my first bottle of extreme-altitude Argentine wine… and hints of balsamic, leather, and camphor wood drifted across my palate…

…well, I was hooked.

Want Some Weedkiller With Your Wine?

You see, over the years, I had grown flat-out bored, unimpressed, and bummed out by just about every wine in my local store.

First, there’s a lot of cheating that goes into that cheap wine from your local supermarket:

• When they can’t afford oak barrels… winemakers use oak “flavoring” and other additives

• When the wine isn’t dark enough… they add a purple dye called Mega Purple (far more common than you think)

• When the wine has any hint of sediment from the soil and air (which is what makes wines unique – the goût de terroir, as the French say)… they use “fining agents” like potassium ferrocyanide (yes, “cyanide”)

• When there’s a hint of bad weather, they harvest the grapes still green… and cover it up by adding sugar!

You can see why the alcohol industry fights tooth and nail to avoid putting a list of ingredients on labels, spending as much as $29 million on lobbying last year.

But it gets worse…

Did you know that a 2013 study of French wines found traces of pesticides in 90% of them?

And a lab test of 10 Californian wines found the weed-killer glyphosate in every single bottle.

Commercial winemakers have stripped out the richness and the character of wine – everything that makes a bottle burst with life – and added a lot of stuff you don’t want in your body.

A Rather Remarkable Alternative

Contrast that to the wine I came across in Argentina’s Valle Calchaquí, where our family ranch is…

Wine from the Calchaquí

It’s unfiltered… made with indigenous yeast and handpicked grapes… and fined with natural egg whites rather than chemicals…

And thanks to the isolation and extreme conditions up where the grapes grow, the high levels of pesticides found in regions like Bordeaux and California are unnecessary.

The levels of residual sugar are also a fraction of those found in most wines.

But the true beauty of this wine is the remarkable flavor…

Some people claim you can taste a hint of smoke carried down into our valley from the lonely campfires that burn out on the high desert plains…

…as cowboys lay out under the stars, their ponchos wrapped tightly around them to shelter them from the howling winds that sweep across this seemingly endless expanse…

…where my truck found itself ensnared in a flash flood.

To be continued tomorrow…

Sincerely,

Will Bonner
Founder, Bonner Private Wine Partnership

P.S. Care to discover what wine made at 8,000 feet above the world tastes like? We have a limited number of bottles from the third-highest vineyard in the world (8950 ft.), plus a 90-point masterpiece from the reclusive winemaker in our valley, for you to claim. Reserve yours by clicking here…