Wine country!!

Wine country!

We had such fun in beautiful little Maipu. It is a suburb of Mendoza, where there are vineyards everywhere you look. It is so gorgeous, green beautiful vineyards with the Andes as a backdrop. On a clear day you can see snow on the tops of the tallest mountains, even though it was about 85 degrees each day where we were. 

I had found a campsite online that looked ok, so we found a taxi from Maipu that would drive us out there. The driver was a very fat man who drove the biggest pickup truck we've seen since we came to South America - an old F250. He, like most Argentinians we met, was completely impossible to understand. They speak so fast and with a very strong accent!  We were doing so well with our Spanish and understanding people really well all through Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, but we can't understand anyone in Argentina!  We finally gathered from this guy that he was recommending a butcher shop to us that made the best chorizo, in his very well researched opinion, in all of Argentina. So we stopped and bought some chorizo, and it really was fabulous. 

The campsite was amazing!  It was huge and had tons of sites for tents, a pool, about 7 soccer fields, a little store, bathrooms with hot showers - what more could you want?!  And all for $5 per day. 

Our next stop was the bike rental company. We hitchhiked back into town where we rented two adorable red bikes from the sweetest man ever. He gave us about 5 different maps showing every vineyard and olive farm around. There are also tons of farms with olive orchards (not sure if orchard is the right word?) that make olive oil here. Many of the vineyards have olive trees growing among the vines and also make olive oil along with wine. 

We set off that afternoon to see two vineyards, even though it was getting late, because the next day (Sunday) most of the vineyards were closed. Our first stop was a bodega called Vistandes. It is considered a "boutique" winery because they produce less than 1 million liters of wine per year. It didn't seem like a boutique, since it was huge and very modern. We got a great tour and got to do two tastings. They make a really wonderful Malbec (the most popular grape here) and also a very good white wine called Torrontes. The Torrontes grapes are grown farther north, near Salta. 

Our next stop was Familia Tomas. It's a smaller vineyard, owned by the Tomas family for many generations. It was beautiful, and we got to taste their young Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, and their Malbec that had been aged in oak. Finally, we tasted their sweet dessert wine made from Torrontes grapes. It was a bit too sweet for our tastes, but the other wines were delicious!

The next morning we were excited to head off for more vineyards, but Jonathan's front tire on his bike was flat. Luckily, we found a friend who called the bike shop, and they sent someone out pretty quickly to fix it at no cost. And because we had lost an hour due to the flat, they offered to come back the next day and pick us up in their van so we didn't have to bike all the way back to the shop. So sweet!

So we were off again by late morning and stopped first at the only organic vineyard in the area - Family Cecchine. This was our favorite!  The guide was a young guy from CA who had been traveling around the area, fallen in love with this place, and stayed for 3 months learning about growing organically, all the different wines, improving his Spanish, etc. He gave us a fantastic tour, and then we got to taste 5 wines, including a very special aged one from 2005. We tried a rose, made from Malbec, a young Malbec, a Carignae (I hadn't ever heard of that, but it was my favorite!!) a Syrah, and the fancy aged Malbec. They were all wonderful, and this guy's excitement about the wine was totally contagious. He was so in love with each one and took such care in describing them. I love it when people are passionate about what they do!

We went to one more vineyard, Carinae, and had a nice tour and tasting, although much less exciting than the previous one. After that day I can honestly say that I was a little sick of wine. That hardly ever happens!  But it was so educational to learn all about the different grapes, the different aging techniques in both French and American oak bottles, the differences in corks, and on and on.  Even Jonathan, who is definitely a beer guy and thinks red wine tastes like red wine, said he could really start to taste a difference in all the wines and was beginning to understand what the hell they were all talking about!

The next day we hung out in Maipu for a bit and then headed back into Mendoza where we had a fabulous late lunch of Italian food. That night we took the last of our South American buses - a 14 hour, overnight trip to Buenos Aires. We'll just be in BA for 2 short days, and then we fly to South Africa!!