After enjoying some downtime on the beach in Bahia Inglesia, we hopped on a bus and headed back to Argentina. I had been itching to get out of Chile and back to Argentina for weeks. Argentina has better food in my opinion, as good or better wine, and is currently very inexpensive for us Yankees because of the exchange rate. What else can a guy ask for?
The bus was yet another 24-hour type affair which includes a few crappy meals (they serve these really horrible sandwiches) and usually a restless night´s sleep in a seat that reclines just enough to almost be comfortable. We have had a few comfortable bus trips, but they are the exception.
First stop on our return trip to Argentina was Mendoza. We had spent one night here when my sister Bonnie was with us, but being wine lovers, this wasn't enough and we vowed to return. After a good night´s sleep in a comfy hostel we walked around town and organized two separate wine tours with two different companies.
Not wanting to rent a car, we needed these tours to get us out to the wineries. You also need an appointment at many of the places and it´s nice to have the tour companies facilitate this for you. Now, these tours are pretty expensive and we didn't have the budget to go all out on both of them. So, the first day we went on what I'll call the "budget" tour.
The "budget" tour consisted of a bus picking up mostly young travelers from hostels and ferrying us to two wineries and interestingly, an olive oil factory. The first winery we visited was Bodega Lopez which is one of the biggest and most well known in Argentina. Their wines are decent, they make a ton of wine for export and customize many wines for specific countries. The tour lady described what sounded like some funky stuff they make just for the Russians. The next vineyard was called Caratina, and is run by a French couple that quit their first careers a couple of years ago and started this vineyard (with no prior wine experience). These people were undoubtly pretty cool, and their wine was good. Last stop was the olive oil factory. We hadn't seen one of these before, so were courious to check it out. The place was called Pasai, and was a small, family run, operation. The tour guy gave a good explaination of how they process olives to make oil and made a point to stop and explain the different types/grades of olive oil. Here's a quick summary:
Extra-virgin olive oil - comes from the first pressing of the olives, contains no more than 0.8% acidity, and is judged to have a superior taste. There can be no refined oil in extra-virgin olive oil.
Virgin olive oil - has an acidity less than 2%, and judged to have a good taste. There can be no refined oil in virgin olive oil.
Olive oil - is a blend of virgin oil and refined virgin oil, containing at most 1% acidity. It commonly lacks a strong flavor.
This place only made extra virgin, of course. After the tour we headed back to the hostel and cooked up our dinner in the community kitchen. Most of the hostels have these and they are really nice for when you get tired of eating out or want to cook up something you can't find locally in any of the resturants. Chrissy invented her own rice dish with sauteed onions, peppers and chicken broth in it that turned out really well. Christened "Mendoza Rice" it could become a staple of our home cooked travel meals.
The "budget" tour was a good deal and we were glad we went, but it couldn't compare to the tour we took the next day which I'll call the "premium" tour.
Chrissy had read about this outfit called ¨The Grapevine¨ that did wine tours from Mendoza. They have their own wine newsletter which had been sitting around in one of the hotels which we had stayed. The place is run by a couple of English ex-patriates. You are supposed to go around in a group of up to six, but no one else wanted a tour the day we showed up, so we got the guide and a driver all to ourselves.
The guide was a pretty interesting fellow. He was English, but had a house in Chile, and now worked in Mendoza. Over the course of the day we learned quite a bit about him, including that he was a former chef, was currently separated from his second wife (long term separation, I think it is pretty much over), and was into international politics. He had also managed to burn his house down at some point while cooking in the kitchen. Not sure if this is the sign of a really good or really bad chef. Anyway, he knew a lot about wine. A crazy amount. We had a separate guide in addition to him at each vineyard we went to, but he always kind of followed them around as they were giving the tour and supplemented what they said.
Charles is the guy on the far left (after Chrissy, of course). I would recommend to anyone who likes wine to go down to Mendoza and sign up for a couple days of tours with this dude. The lady on the right is the winery tour guide. We had our own personal tours at each winery. Was pretty sweet.
So we went to four vineyards. They were as follows:
Vina Amalia - I wasn't overy impressed with this one. The wine was ok.
Alta Vista - These guys had excellent wine. They had one in particular that was from a different kind of grape that we had never tried before called Torrentes. It is a white grape, and I don't usually like white wine, but this one was very good and both Chrissy and I really enjoyed it.
Ruca Malen - We had a five-course lunch here, each accompanied with a new wine. Very good.
Tapiz - Here we got to taste wine that isn't finished yet, straight from the large stainless steel tanks they are making them in. This was pretty cool, because throughout the day Charles was educating us on the different nuances of the wines we were tasting and it helped to taste a wine that wasn't quite done to understand how the wine matures in the final stages.
All in all, it was a great day of wine tasting. Charles left us with a bottle of one of the best wines we had tasted. We polished it off on the overnight bus we got on a couple of hours later to head south into the Lake District.
- Bill