Mendoza Wine Country

Catching up a little bit on parts of the trip past. We’re sitting in the sun on a patio in the backyard of our hotel in Ushuaia waiting for our flight to Buenos Aires later this afternoon. We’ve been lucky to have amazingly sunny weather this late in the season and this far south. Though the days are short, they’ve delivered on sun and fall color. That post is coming soon.

Today’s lunch will likely include our last bottle of Semillon from the Mendel Bodega, which was the first winery we visited a week or so ago before arriving in Ushuaia. Reminded us that we should probably catch up a bit and share some of the photos from our winery tours. They’re called “bodegas” here in Argentina, and Mendoza and the surrounding area has 1,300 or more working bodegas producing wine! We were fortunate to visit 5 of them during our stay, 4 in one crazy day.

We stayed in the sleepier suburb of Luján de Cuyo, outside Mendoza. It had a terribly cute commercial district with some fantastic restaurants, all of which we managed to avoid taking photos of, unfortunately. It is one of the major grape-growing, wine-producing regions along with Valle de Uco and Maipú. We did however, take quite a few pictures during our tours with Trout and Wine, run by an Irishman named Charlie. If you ever end up in Mendoza, take ALL of his tours. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to go trout fishing, but we did enjoy lots of wine and horseback riding.

Four Bodega Tour

Our first tour stayed in our neighborhood of Luján de Cuyo. Being shoulder season it turned out to be a mostly private tour on a minivan. We were joined by our sommelier Renzo and his buddy from Italy Jean-Luca. We learned a lot about wine, Argentina, the world, and the perspective of the 20-something crowd from our tour companions.

Our 4-Bodegas-In-One-Day tour began at Mendel. It is a small, family-run winery with a rich history. We enjoyed a tour of the original wine-making facility that has been adapted to modern use. We were also visiting during harvest season, so we got to see some of the grape-processing and wine-making in action.

Here’s a picture of the Mendel winery. It is a lovely historic building. You can see the modern steel wine vats they have both inside and outside the building. This is an interior courtyard that bridged the gap between the production building and the winetasting area.

Upon entering the facility, you first see the scale, destemming table, and big double doors that lead into the primary wine-making area. It is a small-production bodega. Their most modern piece of equipment is this machine that does it all. Dump the grapes in the top, and it destems, mashes, and produces the juice that goes in the vats for wine production. You’ll notice that it is even eco-conscious with a solar panel for powering it up when using it outside.

The truely unique feature of this historic winery is the massive stone vats where the wine was originally fermented. While the current process uses all the steel vats you see in the photos, the old way was to use stone chambers with steel doors where the wine was fermented. Today, the giant chambers provide the perfect space for storing and aging wine in oak casks and bottles, even if the Being-John-Malkovich entry doors are a little small.

Here you can see the inside of the huge chambers. This one stores wine aging in bottles, with entire yearly productions of individual wines in one rack. Other chambers are stacked 4-barrels high with casks of wine aging in new oak barrels before being bottled.

So, we toured the facility and then enjoyed a tasting of 4 of their wines at about 11 am. Not a bad way to start the day. While we tried, the spit jars did not get nearly enough use, and we still had three more wineries to visit in our day. The next stop took us to Budeguer Bodega. It was a nice contrast to the small-batch family winery as it was a modern production facility producing wines on a much larger scale. I could not help seeing “Budwiser” in the logo and the concept. It was a modern concrete building with all the latest technology and laberatories.

Inside, they were hard at work processing the recent harvests, and we got to see them using forklifts to position the huge steel funnels over the vats, filling and preparing them for fermentation.

As we proceeded to the tasting room, where we would enjoy yet four more wines before lunch time, we got a chance to see the state-of-the-art laboratory and the head winemaker busy at her craft. Here’s a picture of the storage and aging facility just to provide some contrast in scale with Mendel.

Of course, wine making is all about tradition, and no large-production facility can ignore traditions and still be successful. When visiting the vineyards outside, one of the most prominent features was the traditional shrine to the patron saint of grape harvests, Virgin de la Carrodilla, to protect and bless the fruit of the vines.

The third winery we visited was primarily for lunch, and neither of us can remember the name of it. We had already learned as much as we could retain about winemaking after 8 tastings and two tours, so the third visit was all about the food. Ande had a big ol’ tenderloin, and I had pork chops, of course paired with wine and desert. All provided by some famous Argentinian chef we wouldn’t know if we passed him on the street. We met an American from the Bay Area who joined our group. The meal was full of discussion about politics and investing peppered with drinking and eating.

The bodega was a huge operation and had contract corporate security. On a scale even bigger than Budeguer. By then, we weren’t noticing details and the real world discussions were intruding a bit too much on our tour. To keep on schedule and make it to our fourth winery, we headed out.

Our last stop on the tour was Kaiken Bodega. This one we remembered because the building was very stately, and we took pictures. It was also the only Chilean owned and operated bodega on the tour. The highlight of the bodega was the outdoor garden where you could enjoy your wine while sitting among the grape vines.

Of course, by this time we had sampled more than a dozen wines and had a full dinner including desert all before 3 pm. This made for a rather amusing wine tasting. Our tastebuds were fried as was our ability to discern anything other than the fact that we were still consuming liquid. Our tasting guide was trying to get us to identify subtle flavors in the wine, and we were throwing out wild guesses that were completely off base. To add to the fun, our guide Renzo purchased a bottle of grappa and proceeded to offer samples to everyone in the bodega, including the employees. It was a perfect end to our tour day. As you can probably guess, we finished off the afternoon with a long nap back at our hotel.

Horseback Riding Through The Vineyards

We took a day to recover, and then went right back at it. Our next tour, however, was much more modest. We spent the morning on horseback with tour operator Charlie, exploring the vineyards and orchards of Maipú. Because they enjoy the same growing conditions and climate, olive trees are also planted among the vineyards. The region is as recognized for its olive oil as it is for its wine.

Here are a few more pictures of the area we captured during our ride.

We ended our ride with lunch at yet another bodega, Club Tapiz. It was another small, family-operated bodega that also had lodging on site in a lovely historic building.

We ended our meal, as all good Argentinians do, with desert.

And sparkling wine to cap off the day and compliment the chocolate. Mendoza is a wonderland of wine, and we learned more about Malbecs than I ever would have expected. We’ll just leave it here.