Bodega Norton was founded by an English railway engineer who took a detour into wine and never went back. Edmund Norton arrived in Argentina in the late nineteenth century to work on the Transandine railway across the Andes; in 1895 he planted the first vineyard on the south bank of the Mendoza River and called the result a winery.
The site — Perdriel, in Luján de Cuyo — is still the centre of the estate. It also locked in the modern Argentine playbook, because the south bank was the bench-land closest to the Andes water table, with the gravelly soils and altitude that the Malbec planting wave later confirmed as the best in Mendoza.
Luján de Cuyo
Norton sold the property in 1989 to the Swarovski family of Austria, who hold it still. Critic scores on Femente put the house's modern best at the 2016 vintage, with a 92.03 average; the Perdriel single-vineyard whites and reds lead. The shift since has been quiet — more vineyard-named cuvées, more white wine, an organic block at altitude — but Privada, the family-blend everyone grew up with, remains the volume name.
A Norton bottle, then, is unusual in two ways at once. It is a heritage label in a country where most of the prestige names launched only in the last forty years, and it is Austrian-owned in an industry that markets itself on Argentine family hands. The thread that survived both centuries is the Perdriel ground itself — and the Malbec it learned to grow there before anyone called it a category.
