The Correspondent's Hand & the Cepillo Stone

The story of Pintom begins not with a vine but with a typewriter. Gabriel Dvoskin worked as a journalist for 15 years, living and travelling throughout Asia and Europe — a musician and writer who lived in Paris and worked as a war correspondent in the 1990s. At the same time, he discovered a passion for wine and viticulture, particularly the wines of Burgundy, the Northern Rhône, Barolo, and the Mosel. This led to time as a harvest assistant and vineyard hand at esteemed wineries in the Rhône and Burgundy — a hands-on education in the techniques and philosophies that would eventually define his own project.

In 2007, Gabriel returned to Argentina and knew exactly what he was looking for: a cool vineyard site, suited to organic and biodynamic agriculture, with calcareous soils. The wines that had captivated him in Europe — made with limited intervention from precisely these sorts of sites — were the model he wanted to replicate in his home country. In El Cepillo, at the cold southern end of the Uco Valley, he found the region he was seeking. A special microclimate, widely considered too cold for vines, set the area apart from the largely sunny and warmer Mendoza region. But it was the unique soils — composed of three layers of distinct calcareous sediments — that really drew him in.

From there, Gabriel set out to meticulously map the local geological formations and soil types, collaborating with geologists and local farmers, as he sought out the precise microclimate and soil profile on which to plant vines. In the end he decided on a site at the meeting point of fluvial and alluvial sedimentary layers that had been successively washed down from the heights of the Andes — made up of a mix of calcium carbonate, sand, and round river stones, highly acidic and mineral-dense. In 2009, he planted 8 hectares of Malbec and 2 hectares of Pinot Noir — and Canopus was born. The Pintom line, named for the Pinot Noir-focused expressions, would become the winery's most distinctive and most internationally sought-after portfolio.

The cellar philosophy of Canopus is summarised in a single principle: to reflect the place and to translate the character of carefully farmed fruit without excessive embellishment — to make wines of terroir, rather than wines of technique. Gabriel Dvoskin employs only neutral vessels: primarily concrete tanks and eggs, but also used French oak barrels and clay amphorae from tinajero Juan Padilla in Spain. He almost always includes some portion of the stems during fermentation, making some wines 100% whole cluster, but more commonly employing tea-like infusions of whole-cluster bunches in destemmed juice — a technique that extracts aromatic complexity and tannic finesse without aggressive pumping or punching down.

For the Pintom Pinot Noir — the estate's flagship red — the approach is gentle infusion and patient ageing: grapes are harvested by hand, with the first grapes destemmed and kept whole berry with fermentation started via a pied-de-cuve in macrobins; the rest are fermented whole berry in concrete, and the wine is raised in neutral 225-litre French oak barrels. The wine is bottled without fining or filtration and with just 30 ppm total sulfur. For the Pintom Pet Nat — the sparkling expression — the grapes receive a few hours of skin contact before pressing and fermentation in concrete with native yeasts, then bottling with 15 grams of sugar to develop bubbles by the ancestral method. And for the Pintom Rosado Subversivo — the subversive rosé — the first grapes are direct-pressed and fermented, while the last quarter are left whole cluster in mesh bags deposited into the fermented juice to infuse for 6 months in concrete — a radical technique that produces a rosé of extraordinary texture and savoury depth.

The Malbec-based Y la Nave Va — named after the iconic Argentine film — is fermented with 75% destemmed fruit in concrete tanks for roughly a week, then raised in used French oak barrels for 12 months. The zero-sulfite version follows the same protocol but is bottled without any sulfur addition. The Blanco Semillón is sourced from a neighbouring 0.9-hectare parcel owned by the Martini family, planted in the 1970s on clay-calcareous soils at 1,100 metres — the grapes are destemmed and macerated on skins for a few days in concrete vats, then raised on fine lees for 9 months in 1,000-litre concrete tanks before bottling without fining, filtration, or added SO2. Across all wines, the thread is the same: neutral vessels, native yeasts, whole-cluster inclusion, and a categorical refusal of the new-oak, high-extraction style that once defined Argentine winemaking.

Pintom / Canopus is not merely a winery; it is a proof that a former war correspondent and journalist, armed with a typewriter's discipline and a Burgundian vision, can plant a vineyard where everyone said it was too cold — and produce Pinot Noir, Malbec and Semillón of world-class minerality and tension. In an era when Argentine wine was defined by the warm, polished, oak-heavy expressions of Luján de Cuyo, Gabriel Dvoskin demonstrated that the hardest conditions often produce the most distinctive wines — that the same El Cepillo frosts that terrified conventional growers are precisely what preserve the acidity and freshness that distinguish Canopus from every other estate in Mendoza, that the same calcareous soils that were considered poor are actually the source of the wine's profound sapidity, and that a 0.3-hectare plot on limestone can produce a Pinot Noir that rivals the great wines of the Côte de Nuits.

The legacy of Pintom is the legacy of the stubborn hand in viticulture. The 2008 founding is not a distant memory but a living declaration — a reminder that the best way to find your vineyard is to map it yourself, stone by stone, with geologists and local farmers as your guides. The biodynamic certification is not a marketing badge but a moral architecture — a formal recognition of practices that have been in place since the first vine was planted. The whole-cluster infusion technique is not a trend but a logical response to the fruit — a way of extracting complexity without aggression, of adding structure without mask. And the zero-sulfite wines are not a gimmick but a statement of confidence — a belief that fruit farmed biodynamically and handled with patience needs no chemical protection.

The future of the project is tied to the future of Argentina's cool-climate wine movement — to the growing recognition that the country's greatest wines may come not from its warmest valleys but from its coldest corners. As Pintom Sur continues to earn recognition among collectors who understand the value of single-parcel amphora-aged Pinot Noir, as the Pet Nat introduces a new generation to the joys of ancestral-method sparkling wine, as the Rosado Subversivo proves that rosé can be radical and profound, and as Y la Nave Va demonstrates that Malbec can be fresh, structured and sulfur-free, Canopus remains what Gabriel has always intended it to be: a farm grounded in cool climate, calcareous soils, and alive ecosystem — structured, innovative, and deeply tied to the stony soils, extreme temperatures, and erratic winds of El Cepillo. The story of Pintom is the story of a man who looked at a valley that everyone else dismissed as too cold and saw not a problem but a possibility — and who proved that the best bottle from Argentina is sometimes the one that comes from the place no one else dared to plant.