Baby Got Malbec

Editors’ note: in a kind of unintentional (and totally confusing) “Inception”-like layering, this blog entry is about our visit to Mendoza in northern Argentina a month ago, but it was written in Chilean Patagonia two weeks ago, and is now being posted from steamy Buenos Aires. We’re not trying to be Proust or anything; mostly we’re just lazy and/or we never have internet access when we need it. :)

As the glacier-chilled wind whips down from the spiky towers of Torres del Paine National Park and blasts against the “windows” of our geodesic dome here at EcoCamp, I must confess that our sun and wine-filled week in Mendoza a couple of weeks ago feels like a world away. But I’ll do my best to provide some highlights from our week in Argentina’s most famous wine country. Let me just open up this bottle of Malbec here and see if that helps to get the creative juices flowing. Mmmm. Yep, it’s all coming back to me… 

We decided to rent a car in Mendoza for the week even though we’d been warned that the wineries could be somewhat difficult to locate and were spread out over long distances. Probably for those reasons, most Mendoza tourists typically hire drivers to take them wine-tasting, or they join group wine-tasting tours, but both of those options seemed pretty lame to us. Plus, we figured that we’d put in so much time tracking down wineries in Napa, Sonoma, and Healdsburg over the years that we’d have an advantage over the average Mendoza wine tourist. 

When we finally found the vines and the Andes, they were quite a sight to see.Mendel, our first stop on our first day of wine-tasting, didn’t seem like it would be too hard to find. Our hotel had given us a winery map and circled Mendel on it for us. We expected to be there in 25 minutes, with time to spare before our 11AM appointment. Off we went in our crappy little rental car, confident in our navigational skills and armed with what we would soon realize was a naive faith in the existence of Argentinian road signs. The absence of those signs, coupled with the ubiquitous menace of Argentinian drivers on the road (they make Italian drivers seem like models of roadway prudence and patience), soon had us questioning whether we’d made the right decision in renting a car. Quickly giving up on the hope of finding helpful street signs at appropriate times, we decided we’d navigate based on approximate distances and landmarks on our map. This strategy seemed to be working until we found ourselves on what looked like a farm access road intended primarily for tractors and livestock. With no grapes in sight and our only companion on the road a barking junkyard dog, we began to wonder if our previously lauded navigational skills had led us astray. But we carried on as the dirt road took us deeper and deeper into what appeared to be rural Iowa. 

Then, suddenly, grapevines appeared on the side of the road. Surely we must be close! Just as we were patting ourselves on the back, the dirt road we were on dead-ended at another dirt farm road. If this new road was the one we thought it was on our map, that meant that we’d passed Mendel about 200 yards back. But there had been no signs for the winery back there or any indication of the existence of a winery at all – just some roadside vines, a rusted out tractor, and more barking dogs. The NY Times recently labelled Mendoza “Argentina’s Napa Valley,” but as we wandered up and down the deserted farm road looking for any sign of a winery, we wondered where exactly all of the giant coach buses full of boozy tourists were. Not that we missed Napa’s coach buses, but we were a little confused about why this famous Argentinian wine region seemed so abandoned. Mendel had been highly recommended to us by three different sources, so clearly it existed, and according to our map it existed right where we were, but you’d never know it from what we were looking at.

The very welcome sight of Mendel’s quaint tasting roomFinally in desperation, we pulled into what looked like the driveway to a barn. If it wasn’t the winery, maybe we could find some folks who could give us better directions (in rapid-fire Spanish that we wouldn’t be able understand, of course). We parked the car and started walking towards the barn. And what do you know, but all of the sudden, like a mirage in the desert, we found three women in an open courtyard surrounded by hundreds of unmarked wine bottles that they were carefully placing labels onto by hand. Mendel labels. Next thing we knew, a lovely woman named Cecelia was warmly grabbing us by the hand, telling us that they were so happy we’d made it and how she’d love to show us around the winery and have us taste the wine that they were so proud of. We were saved.

Who doesn’t love a room filled with giant oak barrels??That introduction to wine-tasting in Mendoza, although confusing at the time, turned out to be one of our favorite memories from the week. Other wineries we visited after Mendel were more glitzy and corporate (one – Catena Zapata – even showed us a “welcome video” that was as slick a piece of marketing as anything Napa’s big wineries have produced), but for the most part, our experience at Mendel summed up what makes wine-tasting in Mendoza so much fun: getting lost (and found) on beautiful, unmarked country roads surrounded by the snow-capped Andes; getting personalized, free tours of the wineries by staff members who seemed truly passionate about their wine and the Argentinian soil that produces it; and of course tasting one delicious Malbec (and a few blends) after another. We hadn’t planned on buying wine in Mendoza given the hassle of getting it home, but we enjoyed some of the small wineries we visited so much that we decided we wanted to take a drinkable memory of them home with us. Thus, we now have six bottles of Argentinian wine to carry with us from Argentina to Peru to Ecuador to Peru to Miami and then finally home to San Francisco. So much for traveling light.

Our Thanksgiving dinner wasn’t quite typical this year, but it was a lovely setting nonetheless. We’ve posted some pictures from our week in Mendoza in our two Mendoza albums, including some pics from our one-night Thanksgiving splurge at the stunning (and totally over-the-top) Cavas Wine Lodge, as well as photos from the many other wineries we visited that week. I took a lot of notes on our winery tours and we learned quite a bit about Argentinian winemaking from them, but I think I’ll spare everyone an essay on the differences between cement tanks vs. stainless steel tanks and why some wineries use American oak barrels and others use French barrels. After all, as Gino so poignantly reminded us when we were in Chianti, nobody likes a wine snob.