A crisp rosé wine made in Argentina and anchored on Nantucket

By Celina Colby Globe correspondent,Updated August 3, 2026, 8:58 a.m.

Great Point Vineyards' Pocomo rosé, a blend of malbec and cabernet franc.

When most people go on vacation, they bring back souvenirs like a few postcards, a camera roll full of selfies, maybe a bottle of wine. When Katie Potter returned to Massachusetts from a 2022 trip to Argentina, she brought back a business plan.

Inspired by the many vineyards in Argentina’s premier wine region, Mendoza — and in particular by The Vines of Mendoza, a co-op style vineyard — Potter decided she wanted to purchase a slice of the vineyard and start a wine brand.

The resulting brand is Great Point Vineyards, headquartered on Nantucket and making wines with Argentine grapes, a marriage of Southern Hemisphere terroir and Northern Hemisphere hospitality.

Though it took until the 2022 trip for Potter to fully formulate the plan, the seedlings began years before on Nantucket.

In the immediate wake of the pandemic, Potter and longtime friend and marketing specialist Courtney Doyle would often host wine parties at Potter’s island home. The parties were run by Gracie Schadt and Emily Hotter, who at that time ran a wine events and education business called Pocomo Wine Co. The duo has since opened the popular Ethos Wine Bar on Broad Street and closed the event business.

When Potter came back from Argentina and proposed that the foursome launch a wine brand using grapes from the Mendoza vineyard, Doyle, Schadt, and Hotter were immediately on board.

And so, out of a checked bag and a love of wine, Great Point Vineyards was born.

Great Point Vineyards is now on its second vintage of Pocomo rosé, a blend of 93 percent malbec and 7 percent cabernet franc. The malbec is grown on the acre of land within The Vines of Mendoza’s co-op vineyard that Potter officially purchased in 2023, and the franc comes from another plot on the vineyard.

Gracie Schadt, Katie Potter, Courtney Doyle, and Emily Hotter, the owners of Great Point Vineyards.Great Point Vineyards

The arrangement works like this: The Vines of Mendoza handles all of the farming, and its on-site winemaker Mariana Onofri makes the wines. It also manages bottling, logistics, and exporting. The Great Point team then tastes and blends Onofri’s wines and oversees all of the marketing and back-office work. For local distribution in Massachusetts, Great Point works with Wilmington’s Arborway Imports.

The team communicates with Onofri about farming — all of Great Point’s grapes are grown organically — and winemaking decisions, such as how much contact the grape juice should have with the grape skins, a crucial choice for rosé.

Schadt and Hotter both have advanced certifications from the Court of Master Sommeliers and Wine & Spirit Education Trust, but even after years of tasting, they found the work of blending a wine to be eye-opening.

“It made it even more fascinating to know how much a labor of love making wine really is,” says Schadt. “It’s given me an even better appreciation for the technicality of it.”

For the first vintage, 2024, all four partners went to Mendoza to blend the wine with Onofri. Schadt and Hotter had hoped to include pinot noir in the blend, based on other rosés they enjoy, and were surprised to find that the malbec and cab franc alone achieved the fruity, peppery flavor they were aiming for.

“Like a salty watermelon slice on a summer day,” Schadt describes it, “with some pepper and some other layered notes that come from the character of malbec itself that contribute to an interesting structure.”

Malbec is the signature wine of Argentina and is the primary grape harvested in Mendoza. But though red malbec can be found throughout the United States, malbec rosé is seldom seen here. Schadt says it’s been fun to introduce people to something fuller-bodied and darker in color than a typical easy-drinking rosé.

Last year, Great Point did its blending remotely, with samples shipped from Mendoza to Nantucket, and arrived at the same blending proportions as the previous year. Argentina’s seasons are opposite to ours, so the grapes were harvested in March during our spring (their fall), and the Great Point team will soon be tasting and blending virtually again for the 2026 vintage. Down the road, they hope to make a red blend that also leans heavily on malbec.

Pocomo rosé is sold by the glass at Ethos, where Schadt and Hotter will lovingly pour a glass and describe their blending process, and in wine shops on Nantucket and in Eastern Massachusetts including The Gallery Liquor & Wine in Southie and Social Wines in Cambridge.

Though Potter has traveled to many other wine regions in Europe and around the world, she says she was particularly struck by Argentina. Unlike other places, where wine tastings often involve highly technical assessments, she found the wine culture in Argentina to be more about community and gathering.

“Argentina was very welcoming and very relaxed,” Potter says. “They have the concept of the asado, where the whole family gets together and it’s about food and it’s about wine and that was an experience that really spoke to me. I felt immediately comfortable there.”

The wine brand is a labor of love; all of the partners work on it part time while balancing businesses, full-time jobs, and families. In the historically male-dominated wine industry, Great Point Vineyards is run entirely by women, the four partners on Nantucket and Onofri in Mendoza.

Ultimately, Potter says, Great Point’s goal is to bring joy to a group of people sharing a bottle of wine on a summer day, just like Argentines at an asado.

“It makes me think of summer on the island, and that is my happy place,” says Potter. “I hope that it conjures something like that for people.”

Link to the original article published on bostonglobe.com HERE