Mendoza, Mountains, and Malbecs

We've spent the last few days in Mendoza, which really is a lovely little town.  Its claim to fame is that the province of Mendoza, and in particular the area around the town, is a major wine producing region.  In fact, it contains the largest winery in Argentina, but more on that in a minute.  We've got some pictures to show you how nice Mendoza is, but we thought we'd start with what's most important - the day we spent bike touring wineries!

Maipu is a little town about 15 kilometres out of Mendoza and a major spot on the backpacking trail as you can rent bikes for cheap and then tour around about 10 wineries, plus an olive oil factory, chocolate store, beer garden (which we skipped, believe it or not), and more.

We went to the bike place recommended by our (super awesome) hostel and for some reason we got a deal - about $8 a day each to rent a bike.

It even comes with a basket for wine!

This is not Copenhagen - there are not well marked bike lanes everywhere.  Rather, you ride along the side of a bumpy, potholed road with transport trucks, motorcycles, and street racers zooming by.  Still, it's almost completely flat and the scenery is difficult to beat, so I'm not complaining!

The nets over the wines are for hailstorms, and if you look closely in the middle of the photo you can see an odd green bird.  Not sure what it was, but it had a very different call.

How could things be bad with a view of the Andes in the background?  [Note from Chad: far right of the photo is the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas, Aconcagua]

Our first stop was a small, long running family owned winery called Di Tommaso.

Although they will tell you it's the oldest (everyone is looking for a claim to fame, I suppose), this is apparently the second oldest winery in the area.  They have been declared a historic site for the old tanks in their original building, which are no longer used and now form a bit of a museum that you tour through.

Old wine making gear now stored in one of the old tanks.  The ceiling of the tank is coated in crystals [malic acid] that formed there over many years as a result of the fermenting grapes.  The tanks have two chambers - top for fermenting, bottom for conditioning.

Old tanks and barrels.

Stop number two (before lunch, bravely, given my recent no food/too much beer bruising incident) was Tempus Alba, a medium-small winery but very modern, with a lovely new showcase tasting room/bodega building.

While the food looked good, they were out of about 1/2 their menu, and some investigation revealed they were heating everything up in the microwave.  So we went to a recommended restaurant down the road instead.  A very wise decision - everything there was 100% homemade and incredibly tasty!

Homemade empanadas with "Grandma white meat" (?), onions, spices, egg and olive.  Those were Chad's - I had the Italian-style Caprese - mozzarella, tomato, and oregano.  So yummy!

Our third stop was at the largest winery in Argentina - Trapiche.  Their lower-end wine (still very tasty) is produced next door in an enormous facility - their largest wine tank is 5 million litres; enough to fill a train with wine; they've hosted dinners inside the tank.  But of course they have smaller-production high-end wines as well.

A few years ago, Trapiche took over the abandoned but historic winery next door, completely restored it and turned it into their high-end wine production building and visitor tour centre.  When the original Italian-style winery was constructed in about 1912, it was state of the art - had its own rail siding, was steam powered, and very large.  In order to make high-quality tanks, they imported bricks from England and mortar from Germany.  During the restoration, the original tanks were coated with epoxy, etc. to bring them up to modern standards.

The restored, showcase Trapiche winery

Row of original fermentation tanks.  There is another floor of identical tanks below this.

Restored barrel floor - it's all end-cut wood (epoxied now to preserve it), originally mounted in sand, so that barrels of wine could be rolled "gently" over it and into waiting trains.  This was the only winery in the area smart enough to build their own siding so that the trains could roll right in and make things easy for them.

Sweet tasting room

Barrels stored below the tasting room floor.

The winery's olive tree grove, with an old train car on the left.

Loving wine touring!  Taken by a British couple who are thinking of moving to Vancouver.  We talked up the city and gave them our emails so we can show them the best places to drink... well, beer of course, if they end up moving to town.

Trapiche winery is big.  They have a fancy tour and tasting room.  We wanted to hate them.  But we just couldn't - they are well run, up front about who they are and where they came from (rather than showing off or making exaggerated claims), and we had an amazing guide (former musician/now a sommelier) who knew his stuff and spent almost two hours chatting with us since it wasn't a busy day and we were on the last tour.  The key takeaway: Mendoza is an ideal environment for growing grapes.  It's in a desert (officially - they get just 200 mm of rain per year) and they irrigate the vines.  This means that their grapes are very consistent from year to year and they very rarely have a bad year; the last was 1998 when El Nino wreaked a bit of havoc (though not enough that they couldn't produce any wine at all).  Clearly the Argentinians have this figured out, as Mendoza has 900+ wineries!

All in all, an awesome day!