Mendoza, Argentina - 8-12 Nov

We arrived in Mendoza from Salta after another long trip and made our way to Hostel Lao. We were staying in a dorm, but the hostel had a great outside area with a pool and a lovely living room good for socialising or relaxing. The staff were really great and we started enjoying our time in Mendoza already.

We spent the afternoon going round the town orientating ourselves and organising the wine tour we wanted to do two days later. Just as the wind was starting to pick up, we got back to the hostel. The wind just grew in strength and eventually was blowing a gale! In the area it is called a Zonda. It did a massive amount of damage, blowing over trees and we actually heard that 2 people had died. Pretty hectic stuff!

In true Argentinian fashion, we headed out that evening to find ourselves a steak and some local wine. We were still getting used to eating dinner at 11pm so we went for a beer beforehand to use up some time. We found a lovely restaurant called La Lucia and we had some good wine to start off our wine tasting in Mendoza.

In the morning we headed off to go do Mr Hugo’s Bicycle Wine Tasting tour. We caught the local bus and when we got there, Mr Hugo told us that the road was closed due to fallen trees and that we would only access a few of the farms in the north end of town. This was not great news to us as Lou and Simo had recommended the wine farm at the end of the road, Carinae. We decided to give it a go anyway and after paying our money Mr Hugo offered us a plastic glass of wine that had a reputation of making vinegar taste good. This was not far from the truth!

So fuelled up on Mr Hugo’s vinegar we headed off to Trapiche only to get told that the next tour didn’t start for the next 2 hours, we headed down the road to see what we could do. We came across a lovely police woman and she told us that we could go down the road until we found a gravel road that we could link up to Ruta 60 and then we could get to Carinae. So we headed off that way not really knowing where we were going or how far this was going to be. After an hour and a half of riding on gravel roads and then back onto the tar we finally made it to Carinae, thinking this wine tasting had better be worth it. It was! It’s a really small estate and the French owner showed us around himself and did our wine tasting so it was a great start! We then visited the oldest winery in Mendoza, Familia Di Tommasso, and finally we headed back to Trapiche, Argentina’s biggest winery, who did a great tour of the winery and we got to taste some great wines as well.

I was starting to get pretty broken at this stage because Tess was not feeling that great so I was “tasting” the rest of her wines. We needed some food so we finished our afternoon off with a beer and a pizza at the Beer Garden and upon return of the bikes to Mr Hugo enjoyed another glass of his vinegar J (it was free after all).

The Asado at Hostel Lao

That evening we decided to cook in and bought ourselves a nice piece of steak, salad and more red wine. Hostel Lao had a braai area and we made good use of it braaing our steaks. (we braaied more than once!) It was a lekker evening and we got a fairly early night so as to be ready for our special wine tasting the next day. We had booked an exclusive wine tasting tour to Valley de Uco.

Wine Tasting at Andeluna

We got picked up very promptly by Charles, our guide for the day, in the Tout and Wine tour bus. There was a Dutch couple and an American couple on honeymoon as our co-tasters for the day. They were both great and Charles had a lot of great information about the area and the wine business in Argentina and Chile which he shared with us on the hour and a half it took us to get to Valley de Uco. Our wine tour started at Andeluna (American owned) which was stunning. The green vineyards with the snow-capped Andes in the  background was just incredible .The vineyard manager’s wife did the tour and we learned a lot about growing grapes and the different wine making processes they use before getting stuck into tasting the good stuff. The wines were great , the whole tasting experience was great and it felt really special to be able do something like this.

On the lawn outside Andeluna, the view just breathtaking!!!

Tasting straight from the barrel at Azul

Next we headed to Azul, the smallest winery either of us had been to, they only bottle 40, 000 bottles a year, but the winemaker took us for the tour (it’s all just in 1 room) and the tasting. The cool thing about the tasting was that we got to taste straight from the stainless steel vats and we also got to taste wine straight from the oak barrels that was half way through its maturation. Azul was great because we got a very different experience than we’d got anywhere else.

Lastly and by certainly no means least, we visited Salentine, which is Dutch owned and is clearly someone who has more money than he knows what to do with. The farm is 72,000 hectares of which only 700 is under vines. We got given another private cellar tour which was really amazing and then settled down to a 4 course lunch paired with different wines. Earlier in the bus Charles had told us that we had to finish the wine and order a 2^nd glass of each and we tried our best to adhere to his “instruction”. The food and the wine were excellent.



One of the most famous pictures in the wine industry in Mendoza, the winery at Salentine

We got back to Mendoza in the evening after one of the best days we had had on our trip so far. It was just such a special day and we were made to feel pretty special everywhere we went that day.

Later we went to go try book our bus trip to Bariloche, but the buses for the next day were booked out so we were going to have to spend another day in Mendoza, which we really didn’t mind.

The lake in the park in Mendoza

On the third day in Mendoza we decided to check out the massive park they have in the town. We were living a couple of kilometres away but decided after all the steak and wine the walk was going to be good for us. We wandered around the park, around the lake and around a couple of other things before deciding to head up the hill to the Cerro de Gloria, a monument to the victory over the Spanish. It was some fair mountain climbing and scrambling to get up the hill. Without having a clue how to catch public transport to get back to the hostel we just walked, but that made it about a 12km walk in the end, a lot more than we had bargained for when we set out on the walk.

Our extra day in Mendoza was very chilled and caught up with loads of mailing and chatting to people on Skype. We did venture out for a short while only to come across a Saturday morning parade in the town. The ladies were not wearing very much at all, seems like the further south we have headed the less clothing the ladies wear in the parades.

When we eventually did leave that evening there was a massive thunderstorm and as it turns out it was a good time to head onto the next place as we heard there were power outages the day after the storm.