Making the taste of this end of the earth

It’s all part of harvest time at the end of the world.

I spent a week in Patagonia picking, hauling, destemming, and crushing grapes with my feet at Vinding-Diers’s Bodega Noemía and the neighboring Bodega Chacra, run by Piero Incisa della Rocchetta, an Italian wine magnate. Vinding-Diers, a Dane, has worked at top wineries on a few continents and Rocchetta is heir to the throne of Tuscany’s Tenuta San Guido estate.

Through them, I learned the winemaker’s job at harvest — when the winery gates are locked — and that Patagonia still maintains its rough, isolated frontier feeling. Throughout history, explorers, adventurers, and visionaries like Darwin and Saint-Exupéry were drawn to this place.

Winemaking in Patagonia sounds like a bad idea. This is the place so far from everything that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came here to hide. This is the country where six bucks buys you a steak as big as your head. This is the land that made the late Bruce Chatwin, author of “In Patagonia,’’ write: “From its discovery, it had the effect on the imagination something like the moon.’’

Though reports indicate that Chatwin was never one to refuse a drink, at no time did he mention Patagonia as a good spot for winemaking, leaving one to wonder why two of the best winemakers in the world would bother. At no time did Chatwin mention Patagonia as a good spot for winemaking. Yet Noemía and Chacra are producing tiny quantities of world-class wines, and others may soon follow.

Compared with myriad and slick operations farther north in Mendoza, winemaking in Patagonia is a do-it-yourself adventure. Far away from easy access to the right equipment, Bodega Noemía’s first vintages were made in fiberglass tubs usually used as septic tanks. That same year, Vinding-Diers’s partner, Countess Noemi Cinzano, fractured a vertebra using a pole to “punch down’’ grapes.

That said, they are spoiled now by the winemaking they can do. Grapes are hand-picked and destemmed, and all of Vinding-Diers’s wines are crushed by foot — luxuries you pay dearly for in Europe.