Business by Heart in Argentina's Wine Country

An Interview with Gabriela Furlotti, General Manager of Finca Adalgesia and co-founder of Viña de la Solidaridad 

 Where there’s economic crisis, there’s opportunity. That’s what I learned from my wine tour in Argentina.

Eight years ago, Argentina was caught in an economic meltdown, one that saw the peso devalued, companies collapsing, bank assets frozen. People took to the streets. The country defaulted on its international debt. Many governments posted travel advisories against non-business travel to Argentina. What better time for a single, young Argentine woman to open a boutique hotel in a vineyard?

  In fact it was an excellent time, not that she planned it that way. Gabriela Furlotti’s business career is filled with heart over head decision making. Now in her early 40s, this driven entrepreneur in the center of Argentina’s wine country knows herself well and is unapologetic to a stranger. “I know that my business decisions are emotional. Still, I don’t get stressed that easily. During the day I’m full of passion, I cry, I shout. My staff and suppliers understand me. I sleep very well at night.”

Not surprisingly, given the luxurious accommodation, anyone who books into Gabriela’s small hotel called Finca Adalgisa, is bound to sleep well too. Finca Adalgisa is a warm and soulful boutique hotel and winery ensconced within a hundred year old vineyard in Chacras de Coria, one of the original grape growing regions of Mendoza.

It was a heart felt impulse that set in motion two years of work to make a crumbling hacienda into one of the first rural hotels in Argentina’s wine country. “It wasn’t a rational decision at the time,” explains Gabriela. I just felt it was the right thing to do. I had seen this kind of small luxury hotel in Europe.”

In 2000, with Argentina’s recession in its second year, Gabriela’s mother could no longer afford the upkeep of her inherited hacienda and vineyard. Although the vines were nearly a hundred years old and very productive, the one hectare vineyard wasn’t large enough to pay for itself. Many old wine-making families, like her own Furlotti family, once a household name in Argentina, had sold off their properties. It’s a familiar story. Developers were buying up farms, pulling out the vines and building homes for people who worked in the city and who could now commute on improved highways. Gabriela shakes her head. “I grew up here and everyone, rich and poor, went to the same school. Now, people live in gated communities and send their children to gated schools. I didn’t want our finca to be ripped apart, so I said to my mother, let’s make a hotel.”

While a hotel in a vineyard might sound like a thinking person’s business venture in Napa, Argentina in 2000 was not California. Wine tourism didn’t exist then as it does today in Argentina as all but a few Mendoza’s wineries were closed to the public. Although wine making there pre-dates the country itself, Argentines have traditionally been their own best customer. Hugo Stabio, an account manager for the hundred year old Bodega Luigi Bosca says, “When I was growing up, my family in Mendoza used to drink about five litres of wine a day. That’s when per capita consumption of domestic wine in the 1970s was ninety litres a year.” According to the California Wine Institute, consumption had fallen to less than half of that by 2005. Hugo adds that Argentines may be drinking less wine these days, but it’s higher quality.

Gabriela opened Finca Adalgisa in October 2002, a little past the worst of the crisis. Ironically, a devalued peso and a darling new wine industry was just what the hotel needed to get it going!

“Tourism exploded”. Gabriela’s normally sultry, deep voice shoots up an octave. “Before the crisis, there were few foreigners coming to Mendoza outside of Chileans. And most of the tourism was around skiing and climbing”. Mount Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the western hemisphere is just a few hours drive away from Mendoza. “But after the peso fell, a lot of foreigners started to travel to Argentina. And the wineries here were starting to produce high quality wines attracting interest. People wanted to stay somewhere closer to the vineyards rather than in the city. Now there are other small hotels but mine was the first around here.”

And it’s a lovely hotel, an oasis within the oasis that is called Chacras de Coria. On the hacienda’s walls are paintings by local artists, one of ripened slices of peach, another drawing the viewer into rows of vineyards disappearing into a blazing red horizon. There’s passion on these walls, colour and potency; these walls have no fear.

At a time when Argentine banks prohibited large cash withdrawals, Gabriel says that she did her best to remodel with little money. “I couldn’t buy many things so I bartered. But that was okay because I didn’t want to make a fancy hotel. I wanted something more relaxed. This is a finca. I live here and although I have guests, it’s still my home.” True enough. Spotlessly clean, the wood floors gleam with polish, unashamed of their flaws, the little accidents of time past, a sharp heel, a dropped toy. A vase of freshly cut flowers from her mother’s
garden is daily refreshed in each room where an alabaster chandelier hangs from a fourteen foot ceiling.

The design of the new building was another emotion inspired decision. “The place dictated how we would remodel,” Gabriela explains. Inside the tasting room, a gargantuan plane tree explodes out of the floor and through the roof. Another person would have chopped it down rather than build around it. Similarly, in the breakfast room, a gnarled old grapevine, higher than the room itself, stretches out of the floor upwards through a shaft which is open to the sky. This is what a hundred year old vine looks like that is not pruned.
In late afternoon, guests return from a day’s tour of local wineries and gravitate towards the pool, surrounded by a simply designed patio sliced into a corner of the vineyard. White lounge chairs, each with a folded yellow towel await clients. A yellow floating mattress skims the pool. All is sun and azure blue. One of the guests is stretched out on a lounge chair, a nameless black cat curled against her legs. This friendly stray hangs around the pool, singling out the lonely. I make small talk: “Have you noticed that every one of the pets at this hotel are female?”

The Furlotti women love animals. At the finca, I’ve met Gabriela’s two long hair German Shepherds, and one Swiss mountain dog who visits daily from five doors down. Her mother known to everyone as Cuqui, has a toy poodle, two cats, the stray black cat with a knack for public relations, and for a period of time, one injured bird who believed Cuqui to be it's mother. “All the animals are female,” says Gabriela. “We're not sure about the bird. It flew away.”

Somewhere in the distance, someone is learning how to play an Andean pan flute. It’s an restful sound, halting, and then clear. It reminds me how close we are to the Andes although we can’t see them since the finca is tightly bordered by large poplars. Protected inside this beautiful world, we’re similarly unable to see the burgeoning classes of people struggling to make ends meet as Argentina continues to wrestle with a troubled economy. It’s the other world, the less beautiful one, that I learn has commanded Gabriela’s attention.

In January 2004, although still consumed with developing her rural hotel, Gabriela started talking with friends about producing Fair Trade wine, seeing it as a strategy to keep small land owners from being squeezed out by the big wineries and foreign investors. Contratistas are farmers who do not own their land, but profit share in the harvest. These people as well as the diminishing numbers of small farm owners were fast joining Argentina’s poorest classes.

With the wilfulness and energy that characterized her approach to developing the finca, she teamed up with a business partner and about twenty small producers, and the non-profit company, Viña de la Solidaridad (also called Viñasol) was formed. Two years worth of paperwork later, the company received Fair Trade certification in June 2007.

“The nice thing about Fair Trade is that you get together with the owners of the land, the contratistas. It’s really good for these small farmers. As a group they produce enough quantity to make it economically possible for them to keep working their small pieces of land. And a portion of the money is put into community projects that improve life for them.”

The success of Viña de la Solidaridad reads like a fairy tale. In October 2008, Viñasol’s first bottled wine produced by Gabriella’s tiny Bodega Furlotti called Soluna Premium Malbec (2005), scored best Fair Trade red wine at the annual Fair Trade wine competition held in London, England. On the heels of that success, American retailer Sam’s Club agreed to buy Gabriella’s Fair Trade wine and sell it in the U.S. under the label Neu Direction.

So Gabriela, as well as Sam’s Club, set off in a new direction. And while Gabriela understands well that passion has taken her this far, not to mention a cheap peso, she says that it’s time for her to start doing some business planning. “I feel something is going to happen,” she says. “I can feel a change.” Notice that she uses the word “feel”. (by C. Moisse for maturetraveler.blogspot.com)


Finca Adalgisa is located in Chacras de Coria.

Tels/fax 54 261 496 3512 or 54 261 496 0713. e-mail: info@fincaadalgisa.com.ar
Prices and availability: see http://www.fincaadalgisa.com.ar/