So, after a quick flight back over the Andes we landed in Mendoza, Argentina and met up with our driver who took us to our accommodation for the next few days. Mendoza is both a city and a region, it's mainly a desert area (it rains very little there) but has good water supplies due to it's proximity to the high Andes and the snow melt every year, this makes the region very suitable for growing grapes. The largest crop of the region is wine but they also have vast acres turned over to fruit trees, various nuts and vegetables, farming is big business here.
We were staying in a "Wine Lodge" which is essentially a bunch of pre-fabricated buildings nestled among the vines with a central restaurant/admin building that you walk to in the morning for breakfast and in the evening for dinner. In the picture above you can see the view from our bedroom, a small swimming pool, some vines and the majestic Andes mountains, it was quite a hypnotic and relaxing place to stay! The restaurant was only a few hundred metres away and had a really cool underground wine cellar with some 20,000 bottles, it was visible through glass panels in the floor of the bar area (see below) but later on in the stay we got the official tour!
Our schedule was fairly relaxed in Mendoza as our lodge was around 90 minutes drive from the city itself and in the middle of nowhere, so our options were limited, however, wine tasting was very much on the agenda and we visited several producers in the surrounding area over the couple of days that we were there.
First place we visited was Clos de Los Siete, a vast estate made up of several large producers with their own production facilities. The idea here is that each producer has their own separate business but every year they collaborate (best of the best) and produce a single wine. The whole thing was the brain child of a famous French wine consultant called Michel Rolland who made his name in the 80s in Bordeaux around the trend for stronger more fruit forward styles that caught the eye of the powerful US critic Robert Parker at the time. Anyway his vineyard here produces some of the best (IMO) wines of the region, some of which we got to try in probably the most spectacular tasting room I've ever seen!
This is his collaboration (blended) wine, it's not hugely expensive (around the £20 mark) and widely available in the UK, for example you can buy it in Waitrose!
Anyway, we turned up at the estate mid-morning and picked up our tour guide who gave us the story of the "Siete" (seven in Spanish) families involved in the collaboration. Then we jumped into the van and headed up to the first stop which was a rather grand looking group of buildings on the summit of a hill in front of us. Upon arrival we walked around to the main entrance and was greeted by a rather cute looking little Owl, apparently the Owl family live in a burrow just by the main entrance and are so well established that several of the wines have "Owl themed" names! I snapped a quick picture of the little bird just before we went into the building for our tour (see below)
I've been on many vineyard/winery tours in my life and they all follow a similar theme, a quick look at some stainless steel tanks, then some wooden barrels followed by a cellar full of bottles at which point everyone is eager to taste the actual wine. This one was pretty much on point so I won't dwell on it too much suffice to say that the location was totally spectacular with sweeping vistas of snow capped mountains and featureless desert, a real treat for the senses!
This (above) is the kind of thing I mean, imagine having this view to look at every day.. Anyway here I am in the tasting room contemplating the meaning of life and looking forward to getting stuck into tasting some of Mendoza's finest (see below).
Two of these wines were so good that I bought a couple of bottles at the shop on the way out to take back to our "lodge" and consume later that evening, watching the sun set over the Andes with an eclectic cheese platter and some delicious empanadas, life doesn't get much better...
As hinted, here's a picture (above) of the wine cellar under our restaurant, if only I had one of these back home. On a totally un-wine related topic, at breakfast we were treated to a brief viewing of a rather familiar little animal (see below), wild Guinea Pigs, it's South America, of course they have Guinea Pigs, this wasn't Peru however and the kitchen staff didn't rush out to catch the little critters to have for supper!
Wine gods satisfied we spent our last day in Mendoza touring around yet more wineries, sampling some delicious Malbecs, Cabernets, Chardonnays and Cabernet Franc based wines, at the end of it all we bid farewell to the vines and headed back to the airport and our next port of call up in the wilds of the North of Argentina and a city called "Salta"..
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