Argentinian Wine Country

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  Chacras de Coria, Cuyo, Argentina
Monday, June 30, 2008

We left Buenos Aires on a super deluxe double decker overnight bus, and we were lucky enough to sit in the front seats on the top level.  It was a twelve hour trip across Argentina, but with seats that turned into beds, personal TVīs, meals, wine, and a surreal view of the Andes in the morning it was actually an enjoyable bus ride.  I woke up at 7:30 to pitch blackness, but by 8:30 the sun was almost up and we could see the outlines of the Andes under the remaining stars.  Pampas gave way to vineyards, and very soon the sky was pink and the snow on top of the mountains was glowing in 180 degree "omnivision" as Sarah said. 

We arrived in Mendoza a few miles from downtown.  As it turned out, the city center and access to the bus station was cut off by protests.  In a city unaccustomed to violence, in a country very accustomed to protests it made sense - someone had murdered a taxi driver the night before.  The taxi drivers assembled a posse and caught the suspect, and then they struck and shut down the city the next day, protesting their lack of security.  Lucky for us, Jose Luis, the owner of the bed and breakfast (Posada Olivar) where we stayed in Chacras de Coria called a friend who came and drove us the twenty miles or so to Chacras, which is something like Argentina's Napa Valley. 

The B&B we stayed at was an old farm, complete with an olive grove, although its vineyards were planted over with new houses.  The house itself was beautiful, with high wooden beamed ceilings and a very homey feel.  We spent our first day in Chacras bicycling around the city and the country side past vineyards, horses, and strange policemen riding horses, stopping for lunch at Cafe Flora which was spectacular.  We had locro, which is a stew of winter squash, corn, chorizo, and beans, and more amazing Malbec.  The next day, Jose Luis took us on a 100 mile loop south to two vineyards - first the ultramodern O Fournier, and then the more normal but also brand new Andeluna bodega (that's what they call vineyards here).  

O Fournier was Star Wars meets viticulture, with some modern art thrown in.  A Spanish entrepreneur with money to burn built three vineyards over the last few years, in Spain, Argentina, and Chile.  The one we visited looked like it had been colonized by aliens.  I'm not normally a huge fan of modern architecture, and the building wasn't especially beautiful, but it was spectacular.  800 hectares of grapes with the Andes looming immense in the background (impossibly big, they shoot up abruptly from a flat plane at about 1000 feet above sea level to the highest peaks in the Americas, around 20,000 feet) are impressive on their own, but the building where they make the wine is what makes the place unforgettable.  At first it appears to be all concrete curves and function, a flying saucer of wine making, but as we wound our way down from the roof to the bowels of the building, following the path of the grape juice we discovered that the building is as much for show as it is for work.  

Grapes are trucked up curving ramps to the roof where they're crushed next to a state of the art laboratory and tasting room replete with dental chair suction devices to remove already-tasted wine.  From there, gravity takes the juice into fermentation tanks made of French or American oak, or steel, or concrete depending on the quality of wine, and from their it flows down another level into secondary malic acid fermentation tanks, and from there, through various tubes and bifurcating ducts, into barrels housed in a melodramatically lit stadium sized cellar.  We traversed the cellar on catwalks, looking down onto thousands of stacked barrels and massive pop art portraits of women by a Singaporean artist / mathematician who used equations to try to model the beauty he found in the faces of women who impacted his life.  Obviously, it's not enough to make great wine with the latest technology (did I mention the control room that's hooked up to a master wine maker in France who can change the temperature of the fermentation tanks over the Internet based on pH and spectroscopic measurements?).  The taste makers and importers must be blown away with a full sensory experience.  Recent research suggests that we enjoy more what we pay more for, and our research suggests that... umm.. the wine tasted really good.

Next, Jose Luis drove us to the Andeluna bodega, and the tour guide, after ascertaining that we had already visited one vineyard that day promptly offered us use of the bathroom.  This seems to be a theme in Argentina, and even more so in Chile - everyone asks if we need to use the bathroom, even though they are not our mothers.  Is this because we are gringos and they assume we have sensitive gringo stomachs?  Well, the bathroom was very nice, and as we waited for another couple to arrive for the tour we walked into the endless fields of grapes and ate sun dried Cabernet Sauvignon raisins from the vine, the whole time staring in wonder at the mountains which seemed close enough to touch.  Last years' second flush of grapes wasn't worthy of wine making, but it made for very delicious and unusual raisins.  When the couple arrived, we had another tour, drank more amazing wine, used the bathroom again, and went for lunch with Jose Luis and the couple from Buenos Aires we met on the tour. 

If the bus ride to Mendoza was amazing in the morning, the bus ride from Mendoza to Valparaiso was even more so.  We finally got close enough to actually touch the mountains, and I won't try to describe what they looked like, I'll leave it to the photos which we'll post in a few days when we're in New York. 

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