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Back in the 1980s, Catena took the revolutionary step of aiming for higher quality wines by lowering yields, and is now widely regarded to be Argentina's leading producer. The international success of Catena has occurred under the direction of Nicolas Catena, grandson of the founder, and things still seem to be moving forward. Today, Nicolas Catena works with his daughter Laura (who improbably juggles her work as an ER surgeon in San Francisco with the family business) in their relentless pursuit of the finest possible quality wines from their unique vineyard sites.

Catena Alta, a limited production of single varietal wines made from a selected few rows in the Catena family's vineyards, is the pinnacle of Catena's range. They are brilliantly made, possibly without peers in their homeland. These special barrels undergo a rigorous second selection at the winery.

With more than 392.484 acre of vineyards, Mendoza is Argentina's foremost wine-producing Province. In fact it is in this Province where more than 80% of all Argentine wine is manufactured. In Mendoza, today we find a quality oriented industry under constant development and with a focus on the achievement of the best terroir-variety relationships possible. Certainly, Mendoza features an enviable array of grape varieties, given the Province ´s considerable altitude and range: from 1640 to 4921 ft above sea level. Mendoza ´s basic viticultural geography can be divided into three large oases: one in the North, on the basin of the Mendoza and Tunuyan Rivers, one in the Center, and one in the South, washed by the Diamante and Atuel Rivers. By carefully studying the Province ´s territory, however, one can discover a multiplicity of features distributed among a number of highly differentiated terroirs, each terroir having its own altitude and soil characteristics. These terroirs, coupled with Mendoza's protracted, dry and mild-weathered fall season, enable wine producers and enologists to materialize the dream of producing wines of their own design - harvest decisions being made based on their desired degrees of grape maturity.

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