Mendoza

April 16-17

More pictures for this post are in the album.

We arrived in Mendoza at 9:30am. We arranged an Air B&B stay with an older lady. She was supposed to pick us up at the bus station, but we never found each other and after an hour we took a cab. She helped us organize a bike tour of the vineyards in the nearby Valle de Lujan. Our first bodega was a tiny little outfit run by a charming older man who makes delicious wines. His were the oldest of any we tried, and slightly lower alcohol, so we really enjoyed them. We then biked to an organic vineyard, where we had lunch cooked on an open fire -- Mark had steak and I had scrambled eggs. Delicious. Our final vineyard was called Alta Vista and was a larger operation, that made very high alcohol, totally unappealing wines. We took the bus back to Mendoza, where we visited the Vines of Mendoza tasting room. There we had two flights of wine, one a sampler of Malbecs and one a selection of reserve wines from the Uco Valley, which is supposed to produce some of the best wines in the region. Again, the wines were generally too high alcohol (15-16%!) to be terribly appetizing. They also seem to drink them young, so there was no age to take the edge off. At Vines of Mendoza we learned that they have a restaurant at their private vineyard in the Uco Valley that is Francis Mallman's (the most famous chef in South America) newest venture. We signed up for an excursion the next day where they drove us to visit two vineyards and then took us to lunch at the restaurant, Siete Fuegos.

We got picked up at 9:00 the next morning and were joined by a lovely couple from Edmonton--about our age, and traveling for four months. We drove the hour and a half up to the Uco Valley to the first vineyard, Gimenez Riilli. It's a family affair that makes a few decent wines-especially the Torrontes and the Syrah. The Malbecs, as usual, we too young and too high alcohol. We then went to the Vines of Mendoza vineyard (they grow grapes and make wine for other people for $80,000US per acre you can buy land from them and they'll help you make your own wine) where harvest was in full swing. We got a tour of the operations and got to stir some of the fermenting grapes, along with a small tasting.

Finally we got to lunch! Siete Fuegos is an open air restaurant, where you eat at one long table under and awning. The chefs have been cooking over the fires since 4 am, and each course comes paired with wines from the vineyard. The idea is that the restaurant cooks one course with each of the seven traditional Argentinian open air cooking fire types. We started with empanadas, which looked delicious but I couldn't eat. Then we had salmon cooked in a salt dome between fires above and below, with roasted tomato. Next came goat that had been cooked in a pit. Then steak that was grilled on the open flame and lamb that was spit roasted on an open flame. Finally we got grilled oranges with dulce de leche. It was fabulous. And a lot- both food and alcohol. It's the first time I've been hungover before going to bed!

The next day we took the bus to Santiago, which was fine except they were doing construction on the road and we were delayed two hours. In Santiago we had only one afternoon, which we spent wandering. The city felt totally different on a weekday--much more vibrant and alive than on Easter Sunday. We had dinner at a place called The French Barbershop that had a spectacular ceviche and shellfish in cream sauce.

An album of some pictures from Santiago.

Now on to La Paz!