When Anne Bousquet grew up helping her father make wine in southern France, the last thing she wanted to pursue as a profession was wine. It was hard work for a kid and she wasn’t old enough to enjoy the fruits of her labor. But life can throw you a lot of curves and today she and her husband are leading one of the top-producing wineries in the Uco Valley region of Argentina.
How she got from France to Argentina is loaded with curves. The story begins as an exchange student in St. Cloud, Minnesota, where the brutal winter was a cruel contrast to the weather in the picturesque village of Carcassonne, France.
But among the exchange students from other countries was her future husband — Labid Ameri from Spain. Bousquet was studying to be an economist and Ameri was pursuing a career as a stock broker. Eventually, they landed well-paying jobs in Boston while Anne’s father, Jean, continued to make wine.
But, after falling in love with Argentina while he was on vacation, Jean Bousquet decided to sell everything when he was 50 years old and buy virgin land in the remote Gualtallary Valley. No one else was growing vines there in the mid-1990s, but his intuition and training as a grape grower told him this was an ideal location for a vineyard. Unlike southern France, where the abundant rain made it difficult to farm organically, the arid valley afforded him the opportunity to grow grapes without the use of pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilizer.
It was Jean’s dream �.
