The vines of Mendoza survive on meltwater that fell as snow on peaks nearly seven kilometres high. Rain here averages barely 200 millimetres a year. Without the Andes, the province would be desert scrub. Irrigation made it otherwise. Huarpe communities cut the first channels long before the Spanish arrived, diverting the Mendoza and Tunuyán rivers across the alluvial fan. Colonial settlers inherited those acequias and widened them. Italian and Spanish immigrants arrived in the late nineteenth century, and the railway reached Mendoza city in 1885, carrying wine east to Buenos Aires in bulk. Malbec, a Bordeaux grape then falling out of favour in France, took to the dry heat and wide diurnal swing. It became the country's signature. A mendoza horseback riding and wine tour follows the same geography those settlers depended on: water from above, vineyards below. The horse was never decorative in this landscape. Criollo stock, descended from Iberian animals brought in the sixteenth century, worked the estancias and carried arrieros over the cordillera passes into Chile. San Martín's Army of the Andes assembled near here in 1817 and crossed with several thousand horses and mules. The trails climbing from Potrerillos and the Villavicencio corridor are working routes before they are tourist ones. Altitude organises everything. Maipú and Luján de Cuyo sit between 800 and 1,100 metres, planted with the oldest Malbec parcels and with olive groves that produce a substantial share of Argentina's oil. The Uco Valley climbs past 1,200 metres, cooler, later-ripening, planted heavily since the 1990s and now home to the province's most architecturally ambitious bodegas — concrete, glass and gravity-flow cellars set against bare rock. Tupungato volcano stands above them at 6,570 metres. The region joined the Great Wine Capitals network in 2005, and roughly 70 percent of Argentine wine now comes from these valleys. Cabalgata y vino itineraries pair the two halves deliberately: high ground in the morning for the view, lower ground afterwards for the tasting. Ranch asado, cooked over quebracho coals, sits between them. Entry to the province itself costs nothing — the address is simply Mendoza Province, Argentina, and the landscape is open. What is bought and sold is access and expertise, run by private operators. Choosing a mendoza horseback riding and wine tour tour means choosing which slice of that vertical geography to see, from Andean foothills to olive mill to barrel room, in a single day.