Godoy Cruz 2 Argentinos Juniors 4

Crates of Malbec all round please waiter. This victory against Godoy Cruz – the team from the western region of Mendoza in the heart of Argentina’s wine growing country – was vintage. I’d even go so far as to say that it was a performance of vigorous texture and taste, with a touch of rusticity in the palate. Although it could be that, after six glasses, I’m confusing my football with this fine bottle of 2008 Benjamin Nieto Malbec.

Malbec grapes were originally grown in south-eastern France but  in Argentina found more propitious features for their development. They produce wines of pleasant taste, medium body with certain earthy notes and an intense purple colour. You what?! I’ve nicked all this, obviously, from a pretentious wine page but I think it translates as ‘Malbec grapes grow much better on the slopes of the eastern Andes and if you guzzle a bottle or two with a fat, juicy lump of prime Argentine beef it’ll slide down your throat smoother than a ball through David James’ goalkeeping gloves.’

Squeeze these

Argentine wine now sells huge amounts in the United States and Europe. It’s still cheap, it’s pretty good and the labels are posh enough that if you take a bottle to someone’s house, they might not realise that you’re a tight bugger pleased to get some change out of a fiver.

Argentines have been producing and guzzling wine for some time. But until recently they didn’t sell a great deal abroad, leaving that to the Chileans, their neighbours on the other side of the Andes. However a drastic, even by Argentine standards, economic collapse in 2001-2 and growing expertise, plus plenty of foreign partnerships, led to a boom in overseas sales.

Argentines in general don’t drink that much and most of what they do consume is at mealtimes. The only quality beer that I’ve come across was in the country’s nether regions and is produced by the Argentine equivalent of those round bellied, bushy bearded real-ale men and women you find in big tents at country fairs across the UK.

Occasionally, in Buenos Aires I’ve stumbled across the odd dusty bottle of decent ale on rarely visited supermarket shelves, alongside rusty tins of marinated yak hearts and jars of llama eyeballs in brine. Otherwise there’s Quilmes — the national flag-carrying pale, some would say insipid, Argentine beer now owned, although don’t say it too loudly, by the Brazilians.

I’ve never seen beer drunk at Argentine football matches. It’s certainly not sold inside the grounds. And police were breathalysing the fans outside the last Argentinos Juniors home game I went to.

My wife, Claudia, spent her rebellious teenage years drinking in Buenos Aires milk bars. “Chocolate milkshakes all round, barman. And don’t hold back on the sprinkly stuff!” So when she first visited England and was subjected to the custom of buying drinks in rounds, she stumbled.

“No, I’m fine,” she said when the second round was offered, since she’d barely reached down to the first dimple of her half pint glass. There were walkouts, there were hurrumphs of disgust and the landlord had a quiet word with me. I had a quiet word with her and one small but serious cultural divide was bridged.

One of the joys of living in Argentina is that, if left to look after the children as I was for this game, it’s perfectly within the realms of the law to be an irresponsible parent and watch the game with them in a nearby bar. While my son sipped on his Coke, I ordered a glass of Malbec. I remember at one stage an aroma of mature plum, intense with an elegant yet well-balanced taste. But looking back, I’m not sure whether that applied to the wine or the peanuts.

I suspect the restrained imbibing of alcohol in Argentina is due to the influence of the large number of immigrants from Italy – a nation of moderate drinkers. Despite the best efforts of local television advertisers, the phrases ‘binge drinking’ and ‘this round’s on me’ simply don’t figure in any of the Argentine phrase books that I’ve come across.

But while they may not overdo it on the booze, no-one shovels meat down their throats quite like the Argentines. The average consumption is about 80kg per person per year, which is a quarter of a cow more than your average Texan and pretty much a whole herd more than the average Brit.

I don’t know a home in Argentina that doesn’t have a parrilla or barbeque, even in tenth floor apartment blocks which one way or another will manage to squeeze the grill and chimney into the corner of their balcony.

On Sunday afternoons the waft of grilled meat floats over Buenos Aires from a million fires, in back gardens, patios, balconies, by the roadside and restaurants. And I don’t just mean a few decent cuts of beef. I’m talking intestines, tongue and heart – and that’s just for starters. Then there’s a dazzling array of different cuts of meat. Some talk of the Inuit and their many different words for snow.  The Argentine equivalent is meat cuts – lomo, bife de chorizo, cuadril, vacio, matambre, asado and on and on until you look in the mirror one day and find you’re fatter than Diego Maradona. So much meat doesn’t leave a lot of room for much else. A few chips perhaps? Salads are strictly for show – a touch of green to break up the monotony of all that filthy flesh.

One of the main reasons Argentines eat so much meat is firstly because they’ve got the space to rear the cattle– the vast, fertile grasslands in the centre of the country known as the Pampas. Although, what once looked like endless plains are fast being covered by the easier to grow and far more lucrative genetically modified soya. I find that they’re very difficult to barbeque – they tend to slip through the grill and get lost in the burning charcoal.

Sorry to go all psychiatry, but that’s one of the hazards in a country which has more analysts, therapists and psychiatrists per head of self-absorbed citizen than a New York premier of the latest Woody Allen film. My view is that standing over the open fire with a long fork in their hand helps the men stay in touch with their wild, rural roots.

The gaucho, the Argentine cowboy, tamed the pampas, sleeping under the stars, fighting off the Indians and controlling the livestock. They were armed with just a sharp knife and a set of boleadoras, which look like a couple of sun-dried bull’s testicles tied to a piece of string. They’re flung, often from a great distance, around the legs of stray cows to bring them into line – a kind of an Argentine lasso.

These men were so hard, so duro, that they made John Wayne and Clint Eastwood look like a couple of King’s Road hair stylists. Most modern-day Argentine men now use deodorant, work in an office and listen to their i-pods. But on a Sunday, it’s they, not the women who generally cook the rest of the week, who stand in front of the parrilla with a big cooking implement and a glass of Malbec. They’ll talk about blokey things — the weekend footy fixtures or their cars — as a sub-conscious way of trying to re-establish some kind of link with the last vestiges of that raw, original Argentinianness — their gaucho roots.

Hat-trick Hauche

With this amount of wine and a performance like the one Argentinos Juniors put in tonight, I’m in danger of getting carried away. They played the same brand of attacking, passing football they played last week, spraying the ball around the pitch and always providing passing options for one another.

The home team went ahead, against the run of play, just before half-time. But the visitors stuck to their game plan and were rewarded with a hat-trick from Gabriel Hauche and a fourth from last week’s hero, Ismael Sosa. I know I’m slurring my words and repeating myself but this really was a performance of vigorous texture and taste, leaving a touch of rusticity in the palate.