Searing heat in Mendoza wine country

We arrived in Mendoza and taking our first steps out of the semi cool atmosphere of our twenty hour bus it became immediately apparent that we will be living inside an oven for the next few days. It was unbelievably hot and it was the day after Boxing Day, strange. We made our way to our hostel which was really welcoming and friendly but still hugely skin meltingly hot. We were grateful to see a fan next to our bed. There was a huge a very green grape vine growing all over the outside area and a roof terrace, which was only safe to out on when the sun had left the sky.

Despite all this, we decided to take a bus to the nearby wine making town, Maipu, and hire some bikes to cycle around the bodegas. Maipu was where the Italian immigrant families set up the first bodegas in Argentina, so it has the oldest ones in the country. It is possible to hire bikes and cycle on a self guided tour around the bodegas, taking tours of the wineries and tasting the wines they make. We had heard some horror stories at our hostel about people hurting themselves (one guy even smashed his two front teeth out) on dodgy bikes so we took our time choosing ours. We had a map and made the plan to cycle to the furthest point first and slowly make our way back down to the bike hire shop at the end of the day. Before I came I envisaged boozy, wobbly cycling around country lanes in the sunshine. It was not like this at all. There was a main road that we had to cycle one which was dusty and VERY main. I'm talking about huge trucks and buses zooming passed so close to us that we wobbled on our bikes from the back draft. It was scary and I was stone cold sober! There was no way I wanted to cycle on this road with glasses of delicious but intoxicating wine inside me! So, somehow we managed to keep hold of our safety and make it twelve kilometres to the furthermost point on the map, an olive oil making place, only to find that the next tour was going to be in tow hours time. Bummer. So we skipped that and disappointed we began cycling towards the first bodega, the family run Di Tomasso Bodega. 

It was good that we cycled so far up to that part of Maipu because we got to see the countryside as it was starting to be more beautiful and closer to how I imagined wine country to be like. Stretching out from the dusty madness of the road we were cycling on were vineyards at different stages of growth and fields of olive trees. It was becoming more peaceful as well as most of the giant trucks and buses had turned off the road.

Relieved to be off that road and onto some friendly country lanes on which Bodega Famille Di Tomasso was built, we parked up our bikes and joined a wine tasting session. 

We actually learned quite a bit. Particularly about how the wine is stored and flavoured. We tasted a wine that had not be put in a barrel and then afterwards a wine that had been in the barrel for six months and I could really tell a difference. They only use French and American oak to make the barrels that keep the wine. The first un-barrelled wine was disgusting, it tasted very chemically and not nice at all. The wine that had been in the barrel for six months was much more tasty, it had what they call 'body' and had a woody taste. 

The wine the family made was not amazing like some of the wine that we had found so far in Argentina but it was really interesting to learn about the process and see where the wine was made and kept. I also really liked seeing photos of the original family when they first came over and had their first harvest of the grapes. 

It was a beautiful and peaceful place. 

We had a meal next to the vineyards of yummy home cooked food. 

Then we got on our bikes and cycled to a large corporate bodega called Trapiche. 

We had a very comprehensive tour of the history and workings of this bodega and tasted some delicious wines. We learned a lot about the different grapes. 

Malbec is a very think skinned grape and can be drunk with a lot of different foods as it is a very easy wine on the palette. Cabernet Sauvignon is a more full bodied wine that the Argentinians like to drink with meat. Syrrah is a very heavy wine which grapes can grow in desert like conditions (perfect for Mendoza) as it does in the Middle East. Tempranillo is a very fruity wine that is so named because its grapes are always the first to be ready in the season (Temprano in Spanish means early). Not bad for a lay person, huh? So after these two tours we didn't have any time left for visiting any others so we cycled back on the torturous dusty road back to the cycle shop and after making it we had a well deserved gaseosa each! Phew! Not the relaxed, boozy and ambling affair I had imagined but interesting nonetheless. 


Our time in Mendoza was spent hanging out trying to keep out of the sun. We had coffees and media lunas under the merciful shade of the trees in the streets and watched the amusing people which seemed to fill the streets of Mendoza. The Old Taxi Guy for one. He was this old guy who had taken upon himself to be in charge of the taxi rank in town (even though said taxi rank would work perfectly fine without him!) He would use his stick aloft to hail taxis even though they were stopping at the rank anyway and then open the door for people to either get in or get out of the cars. He then merrily accepted tips as he stuck his tongue out at the taxi drivers. Plus there were snoggers EVERYWHERE. Everywhere you looked in each street there was a couple snogging each others faces off. Funny.


We decided that the heat and our visit had come to an end in Mendoza after a couple of days so we planned to be in Buenos Aires a day before we originally planned for. That would mean also that the very mid point of our trip (30th December) would be spent in a place we both loved. So off we set that night on a night bus to BA, beautiful Buenos Aires.