Wine region, Argentina

Earlier this week we took a taxi from Chacras De Coria to Mendoza, an overnight bus from Mendoza to Buenos Aires, and an early morning flight from Buenos Aires to El Calafate. We were on the road almost 24 hours before reaching the land of glaciers, and as I write to you now, we have already moved on to Puerto Natales, our starting point for our four day hike on the W Trek, which we begin January 31st.

The amount of awesomeness we are experiencing so close together is actually a little overwhelming at times! Over the last couple of weeks we’ve decided to take our pace a little slower, not going to see all the sites, but focusing in on the biggest in the area. For example, in Calafate, there were several places to hike around natural preserves, national parks and glaciers, but we ended up just going to the main attraction to give ourselves some rest time before the bigger hike. I say rest, but we picked a hotel next to the lake and mountains, which put us a 50 minute walk into town. Man, it was beautiful though!

I’ll post more about that next time. Today I’m going to tell you about staying in the wine region. Y’all, we semi-accidentally did this thing right. Every time we book a place, we have no idea what it’s actually going to be like when we get there. We’ve had good and mediocre experiences with both Airbnb and booking.com, but this time worked out better than we could have imagined. We’ve stayed in a lot of small apartments and a few hostels, but for the first time we took a chance and booked a private room in someone’s house.

First, the house was beautiful. Unlike many of the blank canvases we’ve stayed in, this house was filled with art and was plenty spacious for us to share with strangers. It also had a pool, a big backyard, large back patio, and a dog we fell in love with – a huge Rottweiler with the personality of a well trained puppy. He never jumped on us, but loved to play and would literally melt when you started petting him…gradually leaning over on you until nothing was holding him up but you!

Kirk with Canelo by the pool.

Second, the house was in the perfect location. We’ve realized that our time spent in smaller towns has been much more restful than our time in large cities, so, though Mendoza itself is not huge, we opted to stay on the city skirts of Chacras De Coria, a small town outside of Mendoza. Our location put us a little in the country, a short walking distance from four wineries as well as from the city center. It was peaceful and so quiet at night!

Here are a few pics from our walk into town…

On a side note, this area looks a lot like Tuscany, Italy as far a greenery goes (the trees, vineyards, flowers and other plants are similar, though they probably can’t be seen as well in this picture), but instead of lush grass, it’s more like a desert beneath (shown pretty well here)! Which, as it turns out, sandy soil is pretty good for grape growing because grapes need good drainage. I was really surprised!

I loved this flower!

This isn’t the most impressive picture, but those snow covered mountains are what we walked towards everyday going into town!

Finally, our hostess! The owner of the house was warm and welcoming, and as it turns out, she was not only a social worker in Argentina, but she was a school social worker for 30 years! For those of you who don’t know me well, I recently got my masters in social work and being a school social worker is my dream job! I interned as a school social worker for a year while in grad school, and loved it! Talking with her about what social workers do in the States was my first try at conversational Spanish since we left. I needed help from Kirk and was nervous, but she understood me! Asking directions is one thing, but life talk… totally different! We also met three of her grown children while we were there and they were all just as wonderful!

This is us with our new friends 🙂 He was the only son who still lived at the house.

This family also helped us get a better understanding of parts of the culture. For example, most of the restaurants nearby didn’t open until 8:30 pm, and she and her family wouldn’t eat dinner until around 10:30-11 at night. As it turns out, Argentinians eat later in the summer because it’s so hot during the day (like, 85 degrees Fahrenheit, which is laughable to us, but at night it got cool enough for sweaters to come out, making evening very enjoyable!). She also saw us making breakfast one morning and invited us to try her breakfast- tea. She said most Argentinians just drink tea for breakfast and might have a small cracker or cookie with it. (If you’ve been following us on Facebook or insta, you probably saw the “included breakfast” one hotel gave us…a pack of 3 plain crackers..now we get it ). We also saw a lot of culture in the way we shared space. Kirk and I are pretty private and try to stay out of the way, but the culture here is all about community and being together. So, for example, it was strange to us for them to have a drum circle going near our window at 11pm, but it was probably strange to them that we didn’t come out and join. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out your place in a different culture, but it is really interesting to see it all at play!

The obvious other best part of this region is the wine and food. We visited 6 wineries and one olive oil/balsamic vinegar producer over three days. One of the wineries served us what was possibly the best meal I’ve ever had. I have pictures posted below, but the site of the food does not do all the hidden flavors within justice!

As far as the wineries, if you don’t know, Mendoza is known as the Malbec region, but they have plenty of other types of grapes too. We were surprised when one of our tours included a visit to a Cruzat, a sparkling wine winery, but it ended up being really interesting to hear how it was made (and delicious)!

The first place we visited was a very small winery that had a really delicious Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s was a small family owned vineyard and we tried a small samples straight out the barrel. Unfortunately, they have no way to send things to the states!

Bodega Pulmary, just a small place, but the owner was lovely and so excited to tell us about their work!

The second winery we visited (First winery of the tour we went on) was Cruzat, with the sparkling wine.

There were thousands of bottles in the cellar, and during the second process of fermentation, they have to swirl them all by hand every couple of months-I don’t remember why, but it has something to do with yeast! (Yeast eating sugar is what causes both fermentation and natural bubbles) Eventually they turn them upside down for the yeast to collect in the bottom. They then freeze the top to get the yeast out. Who knew?

A16 is the next winery we visited.

Here we tried a wine still in production- it was pretty terrible, but interesting to taste in an unfinished stage!

The next place we visited was a treat! Laur olive oil and balsamic vinegar producer. Tasting oils side by side was interesting and delicious!

We really liked the second and third bottles the most. We even ended up buying one to tote along with us for the next few months!

This is an old olive oil cold press! The olives would be picked (The tree behind it is an olive tree) and donkeys/horses would pull the stone in a circle to smush the oil out. Now its all done by machine, but this place had a museum of all the old equipment they used to use.

Olives :).Did you know that the only difference in green and black olives is that black olives stay on the tree longer? We had no idea!

Our next stop was lunch at Casa Vigil, a restaurant owned by the winery El Enemigo. Their approach to making wine is to focus on the soil (you can see the type of soil listed on the tags in the photo below). They don’t age their wine in barrels because they think it hides the soil flavors. Though they were good, their wines weren’t our favorite, lunch though…oh goodness it was good!

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To start, a small salad. The perfectly poached pear in this salad, combined with the roasted pepper, smoke flakes, salty pungent cheese, and spices…it was unbelievable!

Our entree, braised pork with mashed sweet potatoes that were nothing like potatoes in the states. Every sweet potato we’ve had here has been unbelievably delicious (it almost taste like a different vegetable entirely) and I’m not sure what they added to these, but oh man. Combining those with the salty marinated meat, grilled cabbage, sweetly pickled onions, dill, and roasted pumpkin with some floral aroma on it…😍. Unbelievable.

Finally, dessert. Warm chocolate cake with a Cabernet franc sauce, fresh cooked berries and, what really brought it all together – a light lemon poppyseed cream on top. I don’t always love chocolate and berry flavors together, but that lemon brought it together in a way that makes me want to try and replicate it at home! I wish I could send all these flavors to you instead of the pictures! I guess you’ll all just have to visit for yourselves! 🙂

The final winery we visited on the day we went with an actual tour company was Vista Alba, and they certainly saved the best for last. Above is a picture of Malbec grapes growing in their vineyard.

This is a picture going down into their cellar. That’s tumbleweed lights that make it so beautiful! We happened to come for a tour right after they had finished a premium tasting (the expensive stuff), and since they had some left over, they let us try for no additional charge! We loved all the wines here though, even the Cosecha Invernal, which was a sweet white wine, similar to a good ice wine. They also let us sample an olive oil they produce. This one actually turned out to be better than our previous tastings, but we were glad we had already purchased some since this was a little more pricey.

As a side note, at this place we sampled the olive oil, not with bread, but in a shot glass. They ask you to drink a sip and inhale to taste all the flavors. She warned us that it would be spicy at the back of our throats, and she was not kidding! I was shocked as how smooth it was in my mouth, but as soon at it hit my throat, it felt like I had inhaled pepper! Another lady and I coughed a lot – but something about it was still really enjoyable! On bread it would have been amazing!

The morning before we boarded the night bus to leave wine country, we decided to take one final visit to one of the wineries that was walking distance from our house, Weinert. It ended up being the most fascinating winery we visited. The building the winery is in was a winery in the late 1800s, but ended up closing. It sat vacant for about 50 years before Weinert bought it in the 1970s and began production again. All the other wineries we visited aged their wine in small barrels or steel or concrete tanks, but this place aged their wine in humongous barrels. Barrels so thick that they can be used for 100 years. The tour guide told us its an old French way to age wine, and its a good way, because this was some of the best we had. Something about wine aging in really large barrels makes the flavors very even and smooth. You can still taste the oak, but it’s not as sharp. Below are the wines we tried, and we loved them all.

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These are some of the huge barrels…but the biggest one…

Maybe this will give a better idea of the size…

He said this one had been there since the reopening in the 70’s – they added onto the building, moving this in first and then building around it! It was huge and beautiful!

This is us with the original building. Well over 100 years old!

Well, this post has turned longer than intended! Bravo if you stayed for the whole thing! I’ll try to post again soon about El Calafate. I need to fit it in before we are out of pocket, hiking. And on that note – you likely won’t be able to reach us the 31st-3rd, so don’t be alarmed if you try and are unsuccessful.