Wine Country - mmmMendoza

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We arrived in Mendoza after travelling all night from Buenos Aires. The local tourist information office referred us to a hostel called Lifehouse which had a pool. This was very welcome, Mendoza was baking! We chilled for the rest of that day and decided to do a wine tour the next day and a hike the day after (to get rid of some of the post-Christmas podge).

Wine 1-01

After some admin stuff in the morning (sorting out buses, planes, accomodation for the next leg) we headed off on our tour of two bodegas (vineyards). The first bodega, Lopez was a factory bodega. When we arrived a huge lorry with a huge tank (not unlike a milk lorry!) was leaving filled with wine. The bodega had a small museum of machinery used in wine making, including machinery for squeezing the grapes and deoxygenating it. The wine was stored in huge metal vats for a period of time (this varied depending on whether it was red or white wine) and it was then stored in huge wooden vats. It was a big operation. We got to taste some wine but decided to wait until our visit to the traditional (artisanal) bodega to make a purchase. This bodega was on a much smaller scale but we could see the vineyards where the grapes came from. They used more manual methods for separating skin and seeds from the wine and even labeled the bottles themselves, writing the alcohol content on to the label by hand. I have never done a wine tasting course so afterwards I found the demonstration that our guide gave us very interesting. He explained that there were three phases:
1. Visual phase
2. Olfactory phase
3. Gustatory phase (tasting of course)
The visual stage looks at things like brilliance, colour and tears. The olfactory phase appreciates the aroma, is it fruity, woody or spiced? Wines can have aromas of everything from chocolate to coffee to tobacco smoke to old socks (only joking about the last one). Then it was time for tasting, we tasted a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Malbec. We both preferred the Malbec (aromas of chocolate, cherry, pepper and curiously tobacco smoke), so we bought a bottle of that. Later we also visited an olive farm, they explained to us the difference between the olives that can be eaten (bigger) and the olives used in oil (smaller). Olives for oil are only picked when they change in colour from green to black. We got some nice picadas (finger food) at the end of the tour and bought some lovely sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil (I´m getting hungry writing this).

We went to the town plaza for a big steak dinner that night.

Time to pay...

At 9am we were collected for our hike and so it was time to work off all of those steaks and wine dinners that we have been having. Our hiking companions were our guide Pepe (a P.E. teacher during the school year) and an American couple, Dana and Mark. We hike was more of a climb up a small hill in the foothills of the Cordillera Andes. We could see Ojos del Salado (world´s highest volcano at 6,879 m) the second highest peak in the Western Hemisphere, away in the distance. The highest peak Aconcagua(at 6,961 m, the second highest peak outside of the Himalayan range) is also in the area but we couldn´t see it from where we were. We hadn´t been told much about the hike and I think it came as a surprise to the American couple that there would be alot of climbing involved. Dana was pretty nervous coming back down so we had to take it pretty slowly. The views were nice though and it gave us a bit more time to appreciate them rather than rushing up and back down.

Later that day we hopped on another night bus to Cordoba.

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