Wine Touring in Mendoza

After a splendid couple of weeks in Buenos Aires it was finally time to move on and our next destination was due east in Mendoza, Argentina’s wine region. As you would expect, the main activity in Mendoza is wine tasting, so that’s what we did, spending a couple of days total trying to go out and visit some vineyards. The first day turned out to be rather comical because we tried (and somewhat succeeded) in doing things the cheap way by visiting the closest and most commonly visited vineyards via the bus. Well, as usual, the info we got about how to do this was not exactly correct and the buses didn’t run exactly where we thought or when we thought, so we ended up having to add in quite a bit of walking to get where we needed. In the end, we did make it to a couple of wineries, but the day wasn’t exactly a complete success.

A couple of days later we wisened to the fact that bus travel for wine touring wasn’t going to cut it and since we wanted to visit some of the nicer wineries a bit further away from the town we decided to rent a car and do things the easy way. Fortunately this day turned out to be much more productive and we got to visit a few very nice wineries.

Our first winery, Septima, was our favorite in terms of wine and also offered a cool raised view of their wine facilities. Their operation itself wasn’t particularly special, using stainless steal for pretty much everything, but it was a nice start to the day.

Our second winery, Carlos Pulenta, was the most interesting of our tours. For starters they were using concrete fermentors for a portion of their wines which is something i had never heard of and sounds like it’s a pretty new technique that is not used much yet. Even more impressive though is the fact that the entire winery is built in vertical layers so that rather than having to use pumps to move the wine through each phase of the production process they can just rely on gravity itself, simply opening up channels from one floor to the one below to let the wine pass to it’s next container. The design also ensures that the cellar is well below ground level which helps maintain an even temperature without much energy cost. Pretty cool stuff.

Our final visit was to Ruca Mallen, which didn’t offer the same level of interest as far as the tour was concerned, but they had a nice building with a view of their winery and a very nice tasting room. They were also the only winery which gave you a spending voucher to use for buying wine after the tasting, which we liked.

Sadly only a very small portion of the wines made in Mendoza are being exported to the US or other locations right now, and most the wines that are exported are often not the most interesting varieties. So we were able to grab a few bottles for immediate consumption but sadly won’t likely be able to get more from these wineries once we get home.

So from Mendoza it is onward back to Chile for a couple stops in Santiago and Valparaiso before we turn directly south and head into Patagonia =)