Wine!!!

Dave says, ¨This should have posted two weeks ago but the internet connections have been rough¨

In the past three weeks have been wine touring on both sides of the Andes. One day in Chile and three in the Mendoza area of Argentina. These wineries are mainly very old: they hand pick grapes from old vines, load them into old trucks and ferment the wine in old Oak barrels. To top it off, an old winemaker is there to make sure his family carries the tradition on. For those of you who have wine toured before, its not too much different than in the US. You may get a tour of the crusher, the barrels and then...the tasting. Only that in S. America a tasting is usually an entire large glass. We were sitting in these tasting rooms, staring down a double full glass of Malbec and trying to figure out how we were going to bike the 5 km to the next place. No worries though, they usually only offered a few wines for tasting.

We went to the large and the very small. One winery kept its barrels for 80 years (US wineries usually rotate after 2 or 3 years). They keep them oaky by having a very small person crawl into a very small hole and scrape the inside to expose new oak. One of the groups´favorites was also the smallest we visited. To taste their malbec, the owner literally dipped our glasses into the fermenter (picture below). Afterwards, Lindsay and Kori labeled the bottles we bought. Which were $2.50 a pop. If you like wine and need a vacation, get down here ASAP. If you can´t get away, we will post a list of the wineries we enjoyed in case you see one of them in the US...



These were the pours they gave us at Lopez Vineyards...


Lopez Vineyards near Mendoza, Argentina

At Bodega

18th Century fermentor.

Unlabeled bottles waiting for the next tipsy biker..

Crushing the grapes at Hugo Casanova