She is Argentina’s first formally trained female winemaker and founder of her own prominent estate. She worked in Europe, Australia, Chile and California as an international consultant and played a pivotal role in promoting Argentine exports after decades of economic isolation.
Just don’t call her the “Evita of wine.”
That label, bestowed from time to time by tone-deaf publications and bloggers, sits uneasily with the entrepreneurial vintner and owner of Susana Balbo Wines, which sells two million litres a year, virtually all of it to foreign markets. “Evita was a Peronist and the beginning of the cancer in Argentina,” she told me on a recent stop in Toronto. “People think it pleases me.” Plus, she notes before bursting into a hearty laugh, Eva Peron was rumoured to have worked as a prostitute. “The Evita of wine? Oh, my God.”
Susana BalboCourtesy of Susana Balbo Wines
Despite the unbecoming comparison, Balbo has lately become a political force in her own right, crusading not just for the wine industry but for women’s economic empowerment inside as well as beyond her nation.
Fed up with the left-wing populism of former leader Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Balbo ran for, and won, a seat in the Argentine National Congress in 2015, becoming a key adviser to the new coalition government of pro-business President Mauricio Macri. “If we didn’t win the election, I was ready to leave the country with my family,” the divorced mother of two said. “I had absolutely decided not to live in Argentina four years more with these people. We were not in control of our own lives, our own companies.”
One example: For any wine shipped to foreign markets, Balbo would have just 30 days to prove receipt of payment within Argentina. “If not, I would get prosecuted because they thought I was trying to avoid taxes,” she said. “It was insane.”
Scan for Balbo’s name among Argentina’s lawmakers today, however, and you won’t find it. For what she describes as the best of reasons, she prematurely resigned her legislative seat earlier this month. Instead, she chose to devote more time to a close-to-the heart role to which Macri had appointed her last year. She is the current chair of W20, the official non-governmental advisory body on women’s-equity issues to the Group of 20 forum of leaders and central bank governors. Along with the G20, the group will convene in October in Argentina for its annual summit.
Balbo sees that assignment as a way to apply economic and cultural insights gleaned during her 36 years as a self-made businesswoman in a male-dominated industry, where, she says, the gender gap was particularly palpable in rural regions. Her own business success, she says, started with education and a passion for technology.
Growing up in the rural province of Mendoza, she settled on oenology studies at a local university after her parents vetoed her application to pursue nuclear physics at a military college 1,500 kilometres away. But she soon caught the biology bug, falling under the spell of the dean, a Catholic priest, who, upon Balbo’s graduation in 1982, encouraged her to accept a winemaking offer from the new owner of the derelict Michel Torino estate in Cafayate in remote northern Argentina.
“I was the first woman ever to work in Cafayate,” she said. “It was very tough, very tough.”
As were the wines, apparently. “They were absolutely oxidized, bitter, awful, undrinkable,” Balbo said. The place was desperate for refrigeration, but imports were off-limits during the period’s military dictatorship. So, Balbo took a furniture designer with her to a winery in Mendoza and had him copy the inner workings of a foreign-built cooling apparatus the way he would knock off a high-end sofa. “We built our own chilling machine in Argentina,” she said. “We reinvented the wheel. It was the only way to have some decent technology.”
She soon scored what might be deemed her signature success, transforming a once-skanky, aromatic blending grape called torrontes into a clean, fresh and gloriously perfumed Cinderella at the ball. She says she owes some of the credit to Canada.
Tough to vinify, Argentina’s native white grape is heavy in pectins and given to bitter flavours when left in contact with sediment. Balbo, who had studied food science as part of her advanced degree, had a brainstorm: Add clarification enzymes such as those in widespread use in the Canadian apple-juice industry. She dispatched her well-to-do boss, a former Buenos Aires lawyer, to the Great White North to smuggle back the required booty in his suitcase.
“I dropped the temperature, I used the enzymes and I clarified the juice with bentonite and casein,” Balbo said. “It was very successful.” Six months later, Pan Am Airways selected her torrontes – then a virtually unknown variety outside Argentina – to pour in first class. “Everybody’s doing this style today,” she said.
After 10 years in Cafayate, where Michel Torino’s owner had set up dedicated child-care space for Balbo’s young children to nap in while she worked the presses and vats, the rising vintner began consulting to wineries around the world and working on contract at such top estates as Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in California’s Napa Valley.
Returning home to Mendoza in the late 1990s, Balbo was recruited by Argentina’s most famous vintner, Nicolas Catena, to design the technical components of a new, soon-to-be-iconic winery built in the shape of a Mayan pyramid. When offered a full-time stint as export manager, she declined and instead struck a deal to help make some of Catena’s wines in return for using his facilities to make her own cuvées from purchased grapes. With the new cash flow and savings from her Cafayate days, she also began buying land for the winery of her dreams.
Construction began in 2001 for Dominio del Plata, or the Domain of Plata, named after a nearby 6,300-metre-high mountain. Balbo sketched the basic design herself, initially aiming for low walls and a steeply pitched gable roof similar to rural structures she’d seen in South Africa. She eventually had to raise the walls, however, to accommodate the 400,000-litre storage tanks she needed, ending up with a 14-metre-high building and an unintended resemblance. “People were saying, ‘They are building a church,’ ” Balbo said with a laugh.
Part of the building houses what she now calls the Chapel, a small-scale production room devoted to experimental technologies and techniques. Among them: pear-shaped oak barrels that stand on end and come fitted with pressure-cooker-type seals that trap or release carbon dioxide as desired, yielding potentially fruitier, smoother wines.
As always, Balbo kept her glass full while managing the estate. As a sideline, she served for three terms as president of Wines of Argentina. What used to be a relatively sleepy trade organization doing seven promotional events a year soon was hosting 250 tasting events in 100 countries and sponsoring junkets for journalists to show off Mendoza’s clear skies and spectacular mountain vistas. In four years during her tenure, exports jumped from a meagre 0.7 per cent of the world export market to 3.7 per cent.
At Dominio del Plata, Balbo turns out concentrated wines with pure fruit flavours and reliable balance. Her Crios Torrontes remains a benchmark of the fresh, floral style, although she has been experimenting with an intriguing style fermented in convection-toasted, as opposed to flame-charred, oak for subtle weight enhancement. Her reds, notably the malbecs and cabernets of her Signature and high-elevation BenMarco lines, tend to outperform most similar-priced wines from Argentina.
Balbo is proud, and conscious, of maintaining a 50-50 split of men to women among her work force of 120. “I believe in the balance,” she said. It’s a ratio that seems to serve as a sort of guiding principle for her W20 duties, about which she clearly loves to talk.
Balbo can rattle off gender-inequity statistics the way most other winemakers might boast about their pinot noirs or complain about excise taxes. “Women are paid 26 per cent less than men in the same jobs,” she said. “Women stand for 50 per cent of the population in the world and only 40 per cent of those women have regular, paid jobs in the formal economy.” Many of the rest, she says, are forced to toil for cash, which makes them vulnerable to thievery and domestic violence.
Part of her goal is to help arm women, particularly in the farmlands, with smartphones, computers and bank accounts so they can graduate beyond the black-market economy and protect earnings from potentially abusive male partners. After her stint as chair of the W20, she says, she plans to raise funds to set up a foundation in Argentina for women’s entrepreneurship that will do such things as help facilitate business loans and procure technology.
“My idea is to keep working for women in rural areas,” she said, “running the winery with the team and teaching women how to break the glass ceiling.”
WINES TO TRY
BenMarco Expresivo 2015, Argentina
SCORE: 92 PRICE: $39.95
Inky-purple, this is a concentrated and polished blend of 83-per-cent malbec with 17-per-cent cabernet franc from winemaker Susana Balbo. A blueberry farm in a bottle, it’s potent, with gently firm tannins and notes of smoke, game, pepper and grilled herbs. Worth cellaring up to 10 years. Available in Ontario at the above price, various prices at private British Columbia stores, various prices in Alberta.
Susana Balbo Signature Rosé 2017, Argentina
SCORE: 91 PRICE: $20.95
Marvellous. Made in the elegantly dry Provençal style, although with brighter, almost succulent strawberry fruit and an invigoratingly stony, mineral quality. Available in Ontario.
Susana Balbo Signature Malbec 2015, Argentina
SCORE: 90 PRICE: $19.95
Smooth and sweetly ripe, this is a mouth-filling malbec that hints at blackberry sauce, coffee, dark chocolate and aromatic baking spices. Available in Ontario at the above price, various prices at private British Columbia stores, $24.47 in Saskatchewan.
Susana Balbo Crios Torrontes 2017, Argentina
SCORE: 88 PRICE: $13.95
Light-medium-bodied, crisp, juicy and floral, with punchy essences of white table grape, crisp peach, grapefruit and a whisper of ginger. On sale in Ontario for $11.95 until May 27, various prices at British Columbia private stores.