Mendoza, Argentina's wine country.

If you noticed the tepid tenor of the preceding Buenos Aires post, rest assured that you will not find that in the Mendoza post.  We LOVED Mendoza.

Mendoza feels as if you ‘discovered’ Napa Valley in the early 1970s.  There are supposedly over 1000 wineries in the state and it seems like it.  Wine grapes are everywhere along with the ever present backdrop of the Andes Mountain Range and more specifically the Andes Foothills.  It is hard to describe just how tall the Andes are.  The tallest peak (In the world) outside the Himalayas is Aconcagua at 6,962 meters.  It is located only 70 miles from Mendoza.  Thus the foothills come right up to the city.

The city itself is a really pretty colonial style town.  The main downtown area is an eight block by eight block grid, with a four block park in the middle and four more one block parks in the corners.  There do not seem to be many native trees, but the first settlers of the area made up for it by planting over 2,000,000 trees around town.  Mainly Sycamore trees like we had growing up in Richland, except much larger since the trees are on average over 100 years old.  The effect is that even though it was the beginning of summer in Mendoza, shade was everywhere and we never were particularly hot.  The trees really add a lot of character to the city.

We stayed at Modigliani Art Design Suites, another tripadvisor find.  It was a small boutique hotel with about 12 units.  It was lovely and Martin and Javier that ran the place were extremely helpful in booking any activities we were interested in.  We would stay there again in a second.

The first thing we did after checking in from the 13 hour bus ride from Buenos Aires was head to a small wine tasting at Vines of Mendoza.

Five Malbecs all produced  locally.

After that it was more walking around the city, followed by the soccer game covered in the footy post.

Day 2 I had booked a private driver to take us to wineries for the day.  Mauricio was very friendly and even improvised when I told him basically one day in advance that I wanted to see the Uco Valley and not Maipu.  The Uco Valley is located at 1200-1400 meters above sea level where most of Mendoza is at 800 meters.  It is approximately 60 minutes away, but the drive up into the Andes is beautiful.

Our first stop was Achaval Ferrer, on the way to the Uco Valley.  In retrospect this was our favorite flight of wines that we tasted.  Most of the good wineries in Mendoza are either owned by rich foreigners or joint ventures with foreign companies.  This was no exception, as it was an Italian winemaker/owner and four local Mendoza owners.  Achaval Ferrer owns all the vineyards that produce their Malbec.  Thus they have chosen to drop 80% of the clusters during the green harvest.  This basically forces the entire vines effort over the last two months into ripening only one or two grape clusters.  The effect works, the wines were fabulous.

Before I go on, let me explain about tasting in Mendoza.  It is not like we do in the states.  You ‘get’ to take a tour at every facility before you taste the wines.  The wineries are all very proud of their entire operation, and while wine has been made in Mendoza for over a century it was not until the 1990s when Malbec came to promise as a quality option.  In the past almost all the vineyards produced bulk wine.  The offshoot is they have a decent amount of very old vineyards mostly planted with Malbec next to brand new vineyards.  Most of the wealthy foreigners have also bought vineyards along with building beautiful state of the art wineries from the ground up.  The average winery visit is 60-90 minutes so only plan on 3-4 visits a day and you must have an appointment.
The next stop was Bodegas Salentein.

This winery is solely owned by a Dutch gentleman.  Thus you see a lot of crests and dutch style decorations.  The winery has three buildings separated about about 300 yards and surrounded by vineyards.  The first building is a chapel that looked gorgeous from the outside (we did not go inside).  The second building is a world class museum housing the owners personal art collection in one wing and the gift shop, restaurant and wine bar in the other wing.

The winery, 95% of which is underground.

Underground barrel room designed to resemble the old wine caves.  Really quite pretty with great acoustics.  They sometimes have small concerts here.

Tasting room and our guide.  The tour was in Spanish.  Beautiful Winery, average wines.

The museum building taken from the winery.

Next we went to Andeluna for lunch and our third winery. 

The lunch was so good that I think it is going to get a dedicated post (Chris's Edit: Yep, it did get it's own post.  Click Here.).  Paty and I have come to the conclusion that this was the best lunch and maybe best meal we have ever had. (No exaggeration, the entire experience was superb.)

That was it for our private tour with Mauricio.  Only three wineries, but a very memorable and lovely day.

Spending all this time in the wine country, through this trip and others in Australia, France and the US really reaffirms my desire to find a job in the wine industry.  I believe there is good wine throughout the world that just needs someone to market, expose and sell in order to become much more a part of the public conscious.  Mendoza in general has wine's that are superb and retail for $10, it is really an untapped import market especially when you consider the weakness of the Argentine Peso.

The next day in Mendoza we went from upscale private driver to downscale personal ‘driver’:

Yes that is Paty riding a bike.  Si Se Puede!

Welcome to Mr. Hugo bike rental in Maipu.

They had a wine bike trail set up so these wineries, of which there were at least 12 marked on the map, did not require a reservation.  You just biked on in.  It was a lot of fun, we ended up seeing pretty much the same people at all the wineries since we were all doing the same bike and wine day.

Mevi winery, Andes Foothills, My new favorite white: Torrontes.

Mevi winery, lovely day.

Mevi Winery again, we spent a decent amount of time here as the wine was very good and the tasting room was the first we found that was air conditioned.

Veteran readers of Tobinblog should recognize this old school ratchet style basket press.

After two full days of wine tasting we decided to change it up a bit and signed up for a rafting trip with Argentina Rafting.

Rafting in Argentina’s base camp.

Lunch was already cooking when we arrived.  It was delicious:

Sadly we have no rafting photos as we did not borrow the water proof camera again.  But here is me drinking an Andes beer, in the foothills of the Andes after rafting down the Andes River.

The rafting was fun.  We had five people plus a guide in our boat.  It was advertised as class 2/3 but was more like a glorified float where you got wet.  Which is fine as the scenery was great.  This is the very start of their rafting season, so it might get more adventurous later in the year.  A few years ago the World Championships of slalom kayaking were held in part of the river we rafted down, they left up the cable markers for the course and we could tell some of the markers are located in what is currently in about 3 inches of water.  As the snow melts, the river flow will pick up.

They did have internet at the base camp.  So I ‘watched’ the entire UW v Duke hoops game on Saturday morning via twitter on my iPhone.  Technology has come a long ways.

We liked Mendoza so much, we extended our stay an extra night and ended up doing 5 nights in Mendoza.  Sunday was a pretty relaxed day, nothing outside of restaurants were open during the day.  We tried to catch a cab to cut across town for our 2 PM lunch appointment and literally could not find one, the streets were eerily quiet.  Paty was thrilled to walk the 16 blocks, but lunch was worth it.

I just wrote this post while on the Bus from Mendoza to Valparasio, Chile.  In fact I wrote it entirely at the border crossing into Chile.  I’m not sure what is going on, but we have been sitting in the bus queue that is hardly moving for 2 hours and 4 minutes now.   I suspect they have one total immigration officer working.  The drive crossed over the Andes and the border is only about 1 mile from the pass summit.  It is an exceedingly beautiful place to be stuck.  But stuck we are.

(edit: The stop at the border was 4 hours and 1 minute (not a typo).  Apparently this is an issue they are trying to address by 2014.  If you take a bus from Mendoza to Santiago or Viña del Mar/Valparasio try to book the earliest bus possible as they are the first in line.)

Lastly, if you ever get a chance to go to Mendoza you should seize the day.  We really loved it.  The city itself is lovely and very relaxed plus the wine makes it even better.  I haven’t talked much about the prices, but our hotel was $94/night and most of the wine tours were very cheap or free, the most we paid was $10 but museum admission was included as part of the tour.  Food was really reasonable and a quality bottle of wine could be had for $12, splurging was $20 or $25.