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Argentina - Day 7
Day 7, Saturday, 3/9
We set the alarm so we weren’t late for our first wine tasting at 10 am! We visited Roca Malen, on time, where we were greeted by Fernanda, the winery’s tour guide. Fernanda took us through the back areas of the winery where she explained the wine making process in detail, the equipment involved and why Mendoza’s terroir made world class Malbecs. We didn’t know it at the time but all the winery tastings included special treatment, tours and much discussion covering many and all wine topics. Reservations are required and you aren’t able to just drop by as there are security gates at all of them. We tasted their wines overlooking the snow-capped Andes and pitched our leftover wine into the bucket liberally. We had many conversations with Fernanda but the best was Brandy trying to talk Fernanda into running for Miss Vendimia next year as she definitely was blessed with youth and good looks. Our next winery was at Belasco de Baquedano where we were escorted immediately to lunch. The lunch was bigger than any of our dinners. We had multiple courses topped off with a huge piece of steak and of course, dulce de leche dessert. The wines were incredibly paired with each course. So well in fact, they had to serve us extra Malbec with our steaks. The tour is a bit fuzzy but I’m sure I have photos and asked very interesting questions. We sped back to Cavas Wine Lodge for a well deserved siesta.
I found the energy to run for a while. Brandy also joined me for a bike ride in and around the vineyards. We had to move quickly to make our next event, Vendimia.
We left in our bus around 6 pm and then made about 4 stops around Mendoza to pick-up others. It was quite the ordeal driving around with all the Vendimia traffic but it was fun to see the city, as we decided later that we didn’t need to spend more time in the downtown area. We had very knowledgeable guides as the bus dropped us off about 100 yards from our seats. We were sitting in the amphitheater for a minute before sparkling wine was passed around. We enjoyed all the “pre-game activities,” our bubbly and a very drinkable local wine varietal, Torrentes.
As we learned in our research before the trip, Vendimia, is a party that the area spends 9 months preparing. It’s a party to celebrate wine in general but specifically the year’s harvest. In the early year’s, the local areas would appoint the hardest working woman in the all of the vineyards as Miss Vendimia. Over the years this translated into a beauty contest and the many local wine towns now offer their beauty queen for the contest. Miss Vendimia is announced after the song and dance festivities. Miss Tupungato won, which was our favorite because of the way everyone would pronounce Tu-PUN-Gato!
After a tasty boxed dinner (as we found out through meeting him, the same chef that made our lunch earlier that day, made our dinner), we enjoyed several song and dance routines with themes that started at the dawn of time when God gave us laborers, then progressed to water, farming, tango, grapes and of course wine. As I took a very macro approach to the whole night, I was amazed that these people spend 9 months on one grand night celebrating wine. They also have a wine parade, where the beauty queens from each region throw grapes and other fruit at the crowd. It’s such a spectacular event that is difficult to describe as dancers dressed as grapes jig, multiple helium balloon clusters shaped as bunches of grapes float upward, people cheering for their local beauty queen and the about 50,000 well behaved cheering spectators drinking glass after glass of the stuff (while periodically doing the wave).
