We woke up at 10am so missed breakfast. Both of us had a bit of a hangover, it was a really slow start to the day. We had booked onto a winery tour and thank goodness we chose the half day one which only started at 2pm because it took me until then to start feeling ok! The wine tour was great.
The wine tour was just out of town in the Maipu area. They first took us to an old traditional winery, Don Arturo that only produced organic reds (Melbec, Cab Sav and Syrah) it was such a beautiful vineyard and I was in my heaven tasting all the wines 🙂 it was really interesting to see how they only use man power and no chemical additives for this wine and it is all fermented and stored in French oak barrels. It takes between 2 -4 years before their wine can be bottled and sold and they don’t sell to supermarkets, only to select and exclusive clients. We loved the Syrah (which I don usually drink) but it was divine so we bought a bottle. (unfortunately only one as we don’t have much space in the backpacks :()
We were then taken to an olive oil factory called Pasrai which I must admit I wasn’t overly excited about. The tour was ok but I did find it a bit dull – I much prefer finding out about wine 🙂 it seems like such a mission to make olive oil and a lot of manual effort has to go in so i do now have a new found respect for olive oil. The tasting part the end was the best. They drizzled bread with different versions of their olive oil – virgin, extra virgin, filtered, non-filtered, garlic infused, basil infused, oregano infused. It was really really nice. They put green olive paste on bread and drizzled it with the oregano oil and some sun dried tomato paste with basil oil which was delicious.
We then went onto the 2nd vineyard, Vistandes, this was a very modern vineyard that used all the latest technology to produce their wines. It was really interesting to see the contrast in techniques from the first one. They fermented their wine in huge 500 hecta litre stainless steel barrels and due to the technology the fermentation process can be reduced. We had a very enthusiastic guide and I think he was more excited about drinking the wine at the end than anyone. He literally speed talked his was around the vineyard and finally relaxed when we go to the tasting room. He was pouring us huge half glasses of wine (which was great and I’m definitely not complaining) instead of the usual taster portions. We had a torrontes white wine which as so different to any white I have ever tasted, Pete liked it but I wasn’t sure about the taste. We loved their Cabernet savingnon so we got a bottle of that too 🙂
The tour ended at 7pm and we quickly went to the bus station to book our tickets for the next day. We changed our minds about 3 times as to where we should go but after a quick deliberation we decided we should try get to Bolivia as quick as we can as we will only have 3 weeks there and we have spent quite a bit of time in Argentina now. We sadly decided to skip the places in north Argentina that we wanted to go for and booked ourselves onto the 26 hour bus to the border town of La Quiaca – eek!
The hostel was having a joint pizza party with another hostel that night which we had booked onto and it started at 9pm so we rushed back, stopped at the supermarket to stock up on supplies for the bus ride, packed the room up and went to the party which was at Mendoza Inn backpackers. It was great, as much pizza as you could eat and 30 mins of free tequila from 10:30 -11:00 for £5 and the pizza was all home made and amazing. I opted out of the tequila but Pete had some. The place then turned into a huge party. Pete and I left mid flow and got back at 1am, we had to get up at 5:45am so that we could get a 6:30am taxi to the bus station.
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