Grape & GrainHow scion of top Argentina wine family helped malbec earn its reputation for quality
Trained as a physician, Laura Catena felt unable to step away from the family business, and today divides her time between medicine and winemaking. We try three of Bodega Catana Zapata’s wines, all for under US$25 a bottle
As a child in Argentina, Laura Catena was always on the move, so much so that her grandfather called her “little mouse”. Her passion for science and desire to help people led her to a career in medicine, and she envisioned “working as a doctor and mostly drinking our family’s wonderful wines”, she says.
However, there was a dilemma of duty to loved ones and homeland. “I realised that my father and my country needed my help,” she says, “because Argentine wine was virtually unknown outside Argentina, and nobody knew about the beautiful, age-worthy wines that we could make in Mendoza at high altitude.”
Catena’s solution was to join the family business as winemaker while continuing with her job as an emergency physician.
Catena sees similarities in the worlds of wine and medicine. “Both professions live in a space between art, instinct and science,” she says. “A good doctor has strong instincts and knows how to put many things together. She is part artist, part scientist. A good winemaker is the same. I do a lot of work on vineyard research, and the medical research I did in college and at medical school at Harvard and Stanford [universities] helped me understand what good, serious research is.”