Mendoza

Vineyards in the foothills of the Andes

The tasting lineup at Ruca Malen

When I was initially planning the trip, I thought we’d spend a lot of time in Mendoza.  It’s Mendoza!  The Napa Valley of Argentina!  Right near the highest mountain in the Americas!  But as I did more research, it looked more and more like Mendoza wasn’t really the kind of place we wanted to visit on this trip:

- The city itself is known for petty crime, particularly aggressive pickpocketing and hold-ups.  We were told this over and over by our Lonely Planet, the internet, the owners of our hostel, and most forcefully by the hairdresser we visited our first day in town.

- Everything fun to do costs a lot of money.  Even the hiking in the nearby Andes is relatively inaccessible from the city, so you have to either rent a car or take a tour.

- Vineyards/bodegas are relatively difficult to visit – they aren’t concentrated up and down one road like in Napa/Sonoma, and the tastings are mostly be appointment only.  It’s hard to do more than 1 or 2 in a day.  (The most popular way to cheaply taste wine is to rent a bike and ride around the Maipú area, but we found out that involves riding on a highway, and almost exclusively bottom-barrel wineries).

So, maybe in the future (say once we have jobs again), we could do a really great trip to Mendoza.  But on a budget, not so much.

In any event, we had a nice 2 days there.  Our bus from Santiago (which was advertised to take 6 hours but took 9) traversed the Andes via an insane pass at 11,500ft with 28 switchbacks leading up to it.  We arrived in Mendoza at 2:30am and took a taxi the 3 blocks to our Hostel (the area around the bus station is the most dangerous in town).  After sleeping in, we got our bearings by walking around the town, which was gearing up for the 2013 harvest festival, called Vindimia.  The festival doesn’t seem to have much at all to do with the grape harvest other than its timing – it seems to function primarily as a beauty pageant between the young women selected from each the various municipalities in the greater Mendoza area.  In any event, the fountains in town were dyed red to look like wine, and there were two parades.  We had some lunch, and then were pretty much out of things to do during siesta, so we got our hair cut.  The lady was very nice and did a good job, but she forcefully told us over and over that if we went to the Vindimia parade, we should not bring our wallets or any valuables.  That evening, we did a Malbec-tasting flight with appetizers at the Vines of Mendoza restaurant, and then headed directly back to the hotel before the parade.  Not for us.

The next day we woke up early and took the bus to the Luján de Cuyo area South of town to visit the Ruca Malen winery.  I had emailed 6 wineries in the Luján area in the hopes of setting up two tastings for the day, but only this one responded.  Ugh, but at least Ruca Malen is one of the top-rated in town.  We took a quick tour of the facilities (most wineries look the same), and then did a tasting of 3 of their lines, all of which were fantastic.  Afterwards, we told our guide that we were lost as to where to go next, so she phoned her friend at another winery and got us in for a tasting in the nick of time!  We took a cab over to the Lagarde winery just in time for the tasting (we had thankfully missed the tour), and tried some more wines.  Lagarde seemed to have a wide variance in quality – their cheap wines were meh, while their ultra-expensive wines were great.  So we bought a bottle of their olive oil.

After a detox lunch of pizza, we took the bus back to Mendoza and I passed out on the hostel couch until it was time to leave for our bus home.