Day 8 Mendoza, Argentina - wine, bikes and olives

It is sunny and dry in Mendoza. There are huge trees in the streets and vineyards and olive orchards surrounding the city, but this city is a desert, in the rain shadow of the Andes, and the green is here only because of very extensive irrigation.  Deep and narrow ditches are carved into the sidewalks, a concern for the over-Malbeced pedestrian. That said, we are quite weary as we write this entry, because we road bikes on Mendoza´s Camino del Vino (Wine Road) al day long.  So we´re tired.  But we´re also happy.

 

We woke early this morning on a mission to find the Camino del Vino.  We´d read about its existence in the US, and, as this is our only full day in Argentina´s wine country, we wanted to be sure to explore some wineries. 

 

We managed to buy some city bus tickets and find the correct bus that took us out of the city into one of the many wine regions surrounding Mendoza.  There we rented bikes from a man who looked a bit like Weird Al Yankovic but was 100% a Latin Bob Marley. He owns a business called Bikes and Wine.  He serenaded Olivia with reggae (in Spanish) as he pumped up our tires.

 

Our first stop was a very old winery with a the largest wine museum in Latin America.  We learned about wine making in Argentina, from simple wines made by the Jesuits 500 years ago to the ¨modern¨ techniques introduced by Spanish and Italian immigrants in the later half of the 19th century.  This winery (La Rural) sells a wine in the US under the name Trumpeter.  We´ve purchased it in Madison, if anyone reading it is interested, a Trumpeter Malbec will be what we had.

 

Our second stop was at a very new building that was part of a very old family winery.  We were lucky enough to have the great-grandson of an Italian immigrant show us their Malbec vines, explain the wine making process and show us their in vitro methods for quickly growing vines with superior qualities (their focus is on Malbec).  We enjoyed a bottle of wine on their back deck in the bright blue day, vineyards and olive orchards stretched out before us, the snow covered Andes to our West.  It was, without a doubt, very, very nice.

 

Chris then got a flat tire. After our reggae bike-man fixed the tire, we went to a few more wineries, finishing at a winery where we had some lunch and a fantastic white wine.  I can´t say the varietal because they didn´t tell us, in fact, there was no label the wine as they had not decided where and how to sell it.  Again, meeting the owner was a highlight.

 

We finished our day with a tour of an olive oil plant.  It was very interesting, and the olive oil delicious, though the tour was all in Spanish, so we missed much of it.  We will have to tour an olive oil plant in California when we return.  It seems to be a very interesting process.

 

All in all, wine tasting in Argentina is a very pleasant experience.  There was no pretension, and wines were fantastic.  The best Malbecs in the world come from here, and it was clear when we tasted them.