Cruise Day 13 - Montevideo

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At 08:47 this morning, after sailing 1,042 nautical miles at an average speed of 17.1 knots we docked in Montevideo, Uruguay. After two gloriously fine and sunny days sailing the Atlantic Ocean we were greeted this morning by a monsoonal downpour in Montevideo. Ideally we would have waited for the downpour to abate somewhat before venturing ashore, but we had a 'Wine Experience' booked and needed to get ourselves ashore - in torrential rain! - to meet our guide, Ryan.

We put our raincoats on and headed down the gangplank and promptly got soaked from mid-thigh down. We followed the pedestrian path from the boat to the gate out of the port area. With no sign of Ryan we took shelter in the Tourist Information Centre. This ended up being the perfect spot to wait as Bernie received a message from Ryan suggesting that it would be the most suitable place for us to meet on such a wet morning. Despite the horrendous weather, which must've been playing havoc with the traffic, Ryan arrived at the appointed time to collect three sodden, but still enthusiastic wine connoisseurs for their day trip to one of Uruguay's top wineries.

We set out from the city in heavy traffic ... and even heavier rain! Despite the wet conditions we seemed to be hurtling along at an alarmingly high speed. We had a couple of hair raising incidents before we arrived at the winery - I'm sure we aqua planed for a few terrifying seconds when we drove into a massage sheet of water across the road and Ryan had to take evasive action when a car pulled out in front of him.

Despite the conditions, which I thought should have demanded Ryan's full concentration, he managed to share his life story with us. He was born in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) where he spent the first few years of his life before the family fled to South Africa. As a young adult he headed to the UK where he spent five years working in hospitality in order to qualify for a British passport which would give him more freedom to travel than a South African passport. After completing several wine courses he spent time working in the hospitality/wine trade in a number of South American countries before marrying and settling (for the time being anyway!) in Uruguay. While all of this was very interesting I have to say that it was a tremendous relief to be delivered safely to the front door of the Carrau Winery, where we were greeted by one of the owners, Margarita.

The Carrau Winery boasts ten generations of wine making experience. Margarita's ancestors made wine in the Genoa region of Spain for seven generations before her grandfather emigrated to Uruguay to establish the first of the family's wineries in South America. Today they have the winery that we visited just out of Montevideo, another in the north of Uruguay and another just over the border in the south of Brazil.

Margarita took us over into the winery where we just caught the end of the day's processing of the grapes where they were separating the leaves and stems from the grape juice and pumping the juice off to the vats. I think they were processing the last of the grapes picked yesterday because, with the heavy rain this morning, no grapes were going to be picked today! Margarita was hoping that the weather would be fine over the weekend so that the last of the grapes could be harvested before all the staff are let go for their Easter break. In Uruguay Easter is considered a very important religious occasion and it is celebrated for the whole week leading up to Easter Sunday.

We tasted some grape juice from one of the vats which was very interesting. To me it tasted quite like the juice from green apples. Oh, how it will change between now and when it is sold! The winery specialises in tannat grapes. These grapes have three seeds instead of the two that most grapes have. The tannins are concentrated in the seeds so tannat grapes are higher in tannins than varieties that only have two seeds. With the higher tannins, the wines made from these grapes have been proven to have more antioxidants and a higher concentration of resveratrol, the healthy components of red wine. So, Margarita told us, if red wine is good for you, the red wine made from tannat grapes is even better for you!!

After being shown through the cellars, where thousands of litres of wine were being aged in oak barrels, we saw the bottling and labelling machines before being taken for a private tasting. Margarita's father used to use the room we were shown to as his private study. It was a lovely room with a huge fireplace and a beautiful vintage map replica showing the significant wine regions of the world. Meredith was very excited that it included Langhorne Creek, South Australia where she was born and raised. Ryan asked if I was born in Australia and he was surprised when I said yes. He told me that if he had to guess where I was from he would have said Poland. We sat around a magnificent timber table to taste some of the Carrau Winery's signature wines accompanied by bread, cheese and nuts. As a wine journalist had been at the winery during the last couple of days we were treated to a sip each of a very special 1998 vintage. Yum!

Unfortunately we really weren't in a position to buy any of Margarita's delightful wines, but we did get the details of the winery's Melbourne distributor! As a very small token of our appreciation of the time that Margarita had spent with us I was able to give her one of the Aussie key tags that I have been toting around with us.

Finally, during our tasting session, the rain had stopped. We piled back into Ryan's vehicle and headed back into Montevideo for the luncheon part of today's tour. Ryan had rung ahead to book us in for lunch at the best restaurant in the Mercado - a collection of fine restaurants housed in a converted railway station building. Interestingly, Montevideo has three old railway buildings, only one of which still operates as a railway station and then only for tourists - there is no rail service for the locals! After parking the car we ventured into the Mercado passing an empanada kiosk that Ryan told us is very good and very popular with the locals.

As we walked through the Mercado it was a case of meat, meat, meat, whole piglets, whole chickens, offal, sausages, meat, a bit more offal, meat, meat and more meat and sausages being cooked on open barbecues everywhere. We followed Ryan to his restaurant of choice and his personal selection of food and wine to round out our 'Wine Experience' tour! A massive plate of salad was delivered to the table - some welcome respite from the vast quantity of meat surrounding us! - and some bread. Thank goodness, some carbs to balance out the protein overdose.

As our two bottles of wine were being decanted our entree arrived - chorizo, black pudding and a melted pool of provolone cheese. Ryan encouraged us to make a sausage sandwich by putting our chorizo and cheese inside our bread rolls. Honestly ... a 'sausage roll' really would have been enough for lunch, but then main course arrived. Our main course consisted of sweetbreads (some glands from the cow's neck, which I didn't want to like, but did) and three different cuts of steak. Talk about a meat overload! But wait, there's more ... this was a full on three course extravaganza ... so next we found ourselves tucking into caramel-filled crepes - an Uruguayan specialty. Meredith, Ryan and I rounded off the meal with coffees while Bernie had a beer.

With our bellies stuffed full of red meat and red wine, we walked back to the car park to retrieve Meredith's bag. We thanked Ryan for enlightening us about Uruguayan food and wine. No wonder this country has some of the highest cholesterol statistics in the world. But they are addressing concerns about blood pressure. The president has decreed that no restaurant can put salt on the table, they can only supply salt if it is requested!!

The weather was still overcast, but the rain was holding off. We decided that we needed to do some sightseeing around the centre of Montevideo to walk off some of our over indulgent lunch. The city buildings were an eclectic mix of well-maintained colonial, sadly deteriorating colonial and what can only be described as building/demolition (?) sites.

We had turned our steps towards the port when Bernie spied a barber's shop with a barber standing around just waiting for a customer. Bernie headed in and started miming - 'number one comb on head, number two comb on chin, US dollars how much?' The barber held up seven fingers, so Bernie said OK and was pointed to the chair. I am used to watching Bernie's foreign barber's shop experiences so I took a seat. Meredith decided that it might be good entertainment so she took a seat beside me!!

Well, Bernie certainly got his money's worth. What little hair he has was combed and clipped and scissored thoroughly before his chin received the same treatment. His throat and back of neck were also treated to some cut-throat razoring before the barber declared the job finished. Bernie gave the barber US$10.00 and indicated that he should keep the change. Bernie couldn't wait to see if our fellow travellers would notice his haircut hopeful that they would appreciate this line more than Meredith and I did - 'I couldn't wait for a full Brazilian so I had a half Uruguayan instead'. GROAN!!

We met the gang at 7.15pm in the Ocean Bar for pre-dinner drinks. Gabriel, Yin, Chow and Kim had been out on the ship's full day Gaucho excursion so they had (very sensibly) decided that they didn't need any pre-dinner drinks or dinner. Carol and John had been on the ship's wining and dining excursion and, although they joined us for a pre-dinner drink, they had also decided that they would give dinner a miss.

The ship had set sail at 17:54 and, despite the fact that we were now, technically, in the Rio de la Plata (Plate River) rather than the Atlantic Ocean, we had quite a roll going. So, we three little piggies joined the girls and Geoff and Lyn and rolled on down to the dining room. With only seven of us for dinner we were relegated to a table on the edge of the dining room, right beside the window where we could see the lights of the town's/cities along the river bank dipping and rising on the horizon. Not the most conducive of dining experiences!! Mindful of the fact that I had eaten far too much at lunchtime, I skipped entree and dessert and chose a tuna steak for dinner. I probably should have skipped the wine too but, all too easily, Bernie, Meredith and I polished off yet another bottle of red.



Steps 9,763 (7.22km)

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