The first thing that you recognize when arriving in Mendoza are green trees, bushes and parks. And this after driving for hours through the sand and dry landscape of a desert. Already the Incas used water courses to redirect the river coming from the mountains which were improved and are still used today and thereby creating this oasis.
Something of the green generated by the clever water systems and we were even allowed to try it.
These clever water systems in combination with the christianisation by the Spanish also cause Mendozas main attraction. Wine! Numerous wine yards around Mendoza produce some excellent grapes in this region of 300 sunny days a year. A speciality being a wine called Malbec. Originally from France it disappeared in Europe (I never tried it before.) during a wine pest but just flourish in the dry conditions here. It’s of almost black color, with a good amount spicy tannins (Never drink red wine without tannins. It will just result in a headache the next day.) and a flavor a black berries.
„Never drink wine without tannins“ was the good advice from the lady, that gave us a tasting of the to me unknown Malbec at two different occasions.
After our first night including a free wine tasting in the hostel and half a cow in a restaurant we found our selfs with a bunch of people from the hostel in bus 10/171 on the way to Maipu and it’s many wine yards. Due to some indirectness of the route it took much longer than expected and at a certain point the driver just ordered us out of the bus recommending to walk the rest (Bus 10/172 would have been the direct one but surely less scenic).
Not the best bikes, but decent cheap and including a small bottle of water (Where is the wine?).
We grabbed some bikes from one of the renting shops and headed of to the first wine yard. Here we met the girl from our tasting the night before, now not only explaining the difference between red and white wine but also how to distinguish different wine plants, how the wine is produced and what is so special about Malbec (very sensitive to bad wheather) and she let us taste their premium wine that is only sold in Argentina and of course Germany.
You can already smell the difference on the barrel or just smell the difference of one to another barrel.
These premium wines really were the best of the day and somebody is selling them somewhere in Germany!
After this we went to two more wine yards and one bodega ending up with more than a bottle each in our bloodstream.
Spirtis (or alcohol blood level) were getting high im bodegas and vineyards.
People working hard to bottle the wine.
People working not that hard to unbottle them again.
Accidents can not be excluded under such circumstance but luckily not more than a big scratch resulted from the fall in the ditch. Since spirits were already high and the day still young nobody put a veto to dinner and more wine bottles, so the next day was completely devoted to recovery.
How smart. Tasting different wines from the same yard over for each other. But don’t mess with the glasses, because the grape is indicated in the paper below.
