Wine, Oil, And The Highest Mountain

We arrived in Mendoza after yet another overnight bus from Cordoba on the 5th November. We arrived in the bus station and went directly to our couchsurfing host’s house in the city on the Northern border of Mendoza, called Las Heras. Juan met us as he returned from the supermarket and we stayed with him and his boyfriend Dario in their peaceful house with a lovely garden and super-chilled cat called Matilde.

Sleeping most of the day, we finally surfaced to say hello to Juan and we got some supplies for our four night stay. I cooked some sausage and pasta with vegetables for us, Juan, and his friend Ferchu and we all sat around chatting – mostly about Argentina.

The next day Francesca and I left the house and grabbed a bus into the city. We used a bus card Francesca had sourced the day before (local buses in Argentina are stupid – you cannot pay the driver, you have to use coins in the machine on the bus – no notes accepted, yet no-one ever has coins to give you). We started at the city municipal building which has a lovely viewpoint at the top and lots of tourist information on the 7th floor. The viewpoint has little maps on each side showing you what you are looking at – it is a really good overview of the city and helped us orientate ourselves.

After this, we were rushing slightly to make it to a museum and a church which both closed at 1pm for the rest of the day. We made it to the church and the museum – firstly the Museo del Pasado Cuyano (Museum of Cuyo’s Past). This historical museum held lots of artifacts about the city, including furniture, weapons and portraits – the usual cluster of old junk that is sometimes worth seeing. This museum was more miss than hit, but entrance is a voluntary 10 pesos so check it out if you are in Mendoza, and decide for yourself. I think the big draw here is the large library for researchers of Mendoza and Cuyo’s history (Cuyo is an historic region which includes the provinces of Mendoza, San Juan and San Luis).

The church was nice though (Basílica de San Francisco). Not so much the outside as the inside with its pretty altars and statues. Mendoza is based around the large Plaza Independencia with four other smaller plazas all located at the corners of this plaza laid out in the style of the dots on the ‘5’ side of a dice. We went to all five plazas that day, and Plaza Espana was our favorite. This square had lots of pretty and unique tiles decorating its walls, features and even the floor – all donated by Spain (hence the name) when the plazas were being rebuilt after a period of neglect.

Next on our list was the Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno, but the unhelpful guy working in there informed us rudely that it was closed that day. Apparently it takes galleries in this region days to change exhibits and they shut shop for the duration of the move (this happened to us in Cordoba too).

Another museum we made our way to which was still found in all of the maps given out by tourist information was the Museo Popular Callejero, a street museum located right on the sidewalk - but this had been closed for 6 months and showed no signs of being revived.

With more time on our hands with so many things closed, we managed to book ourselves onto two tours for the next two days, obtaining a discount for booking through the same tourist agency, Mayas Viajes y Turismo, and we even got money changed before we headed towards the East side of the town center.

The acuario municipal, or City Aquarium was an impromptu visit due to the extra time we had, however, it was a little disappointing after some of the amazing things we had seen, particularly Fernando de Noronha. The groups of screaming school kids did not help as we both had heat headaches by this point, but we managed to get around without killing ourselves or anyone else.

Fish from all over the world were presented here – my favorite was the exotic axolotl, an amphibious salamander from Mexico. These were pretty rare as they were endangered, and it looked pretty weird. The huge sea turtle, called Jorge, had spent 15 years at the aquarium, and is rumored to be 90 years old. He looked terribly sad, but the aquarium said that if they return him to the sea now, he will die.

Our final stop was the Museo Fundacional, located in the Plaza Pedro del Castillo, where we were fairly unsurprised to find that it too was closed! We tried the door and the unhelpful and rude guy in this museum (déjà vu?) told us it would open in 15 minutes. There was no shade whatsoever but he refused to let us wait inside, so we waited outside in the relentless heat because the ticket for the aquarium includes this museum and the earlier (closed) art museum for 24 hours.

Finally the idiot who worked there let us in, and we were again unsurprised to find out nothing was in English and they had no English literature left to tell us about the museum. And no guide who spoke English. Fed up by this point we walked around, but did not get much from the museum.

In the middle of the museum were the foundations of the original cabildo, or town hall which was destroyed by earthquake in 1861. There was also pictures of the old Jesuit church which was also destroyed. We tried to access the grounds to the church but this building was behind a fence and the buildings inside were only for researchers.

We shared burgers (huge) and fries that night while hanging out with Juan and his friend Ferchu, and Francesca stayed up late watching Saturday Night Live.

We had a well-deserved rest and a lie-in in the morning of Thursday the 7th, before we went on our afternoon tour which included two Mendoza wineries (actually located in neighboring Maipu) and one olive oil factory.

Our tour started at the agency where we booked the tickets and we picked up a bunch of other guests including an incredibly nice family from Wisconsin. Oscar and his family were visiting for abut two weeks and had sure booked the right places to go to – Buenos Aires, Iguazu Falls and Mendoza – some of our favorite places we went to!

Our guide was bilingual in Spanish and English, and we immediately learned that it is petroleum that was the most important economic activity in Mendoza, before even tourism, olive oil and wine. Wine was the second largest money spinner with over 1000 wineries in the province.

We saw countless wineries, or bodegas, along the way, and many were covered in black mesh and surrounded by roses and poplar trees. Apparently the black mesh was to protect the grapes from the bad weather, particularly hailstones. The roses to protect vineyards from pests and insects and the poplar trees were to protect them from the zonda wind.

The zonda is a regional wind which blows down from the Andes in the afternoons, bringing with it dust and heat. It is responsible for numerous illnesses such as aches and pains, sore throats and headaches, but it is also integral to putting the snow on the mountains, without which, there would be absolutely no water in the region.

We saw two different ways to grow grapes: the terracing and parallel techniques. Terracing seems to protect the vines better and also absorbs more sunlight, but some people still prefer the parallel method because it has higher yields of grapes. It is also easier to harvest the parallel method, and listening to our guide, it seemed that the jury is still out on which one is actually the best. The grapes we saw though were extremely small, as it was only the beginning of spring and the harvest time was in February to April.

Our first stop was a new bodega called Vistandes, which was a bright winery with a modern feel. With one large building surrounded by trestle grapevines, Vistandes produces both white and red wines by blending the regional grapes together. Our tour lasted about 20 minutes, and we saw state of the art equipment being used to pulp the grapes and ferment the must of the grapes. It was not the season for grapes yet, so the oak barrels we saw were empty, as were the metal fermentation tanks.

After fermentation the wine is stored in French oak barrels. These barrels are 750L and cost about US$1000. When the barrels have been used for about three years, they are sold at a massive discount for around $200 pesos (US$33) to collectors or for decoration. The red wine in particular needs to be aged properly otherwise it will taste leathery due to the excess of tannin in the grape.

They also had aging bottles of wine, and after our tour we got to taste some of them. Our first wine was a Torrentes 2013, which Francesca and I thought was so good, we decided to buy a bottle ($50 pesos, or US$8). This wine is only sold as export, or at the winery, and so is unavailable in any of the shops or restaurants in Argentina. It tasted really great – fruity and dry, it reminded me of pineapples.

We also tried a 2011 premium Malbec which we thought was not very full-bodied, and a even burnt the throat a little which Malbec should not do. Another wine was the Cabernet Sauvignon which smelled really sweet but was totally dry. They call this phenomenon ‘liar wine’.

After snapping some pictures, we were all loaded into the back of the minivan, and we were off to the next bodega, Don Arturo. Don Aturo was a beautifully kept winery with lovely gardens. It had separate buildings for pulping the grape and the fermentation process, and was more old fashioned as a family run winery than Vistandes. It also was exclusively a red wine winery.

Once they had found an English guide for us (and we had finished taking pictures in the gardens), we all took the short and interesting tour. The pulping machine looked amazing, with its little wooden buckets bringing the pulp up from the grinder. The fermentation process also was really cool as they had special paint coating the walls of the twelve cement tanks to prevent the wines taste being tainted.

Huge old French barrels were on display – they used to be used for wine but no longer. The biggest barrels I had ever seen!

On to the tasting, and the wine was served with the wineries own olive oil made of olives and grapes on toasted bread. Delicious!

We were served four wines, Malbec, Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon and a premium Malbec from 2004. All wines were extremely good, but the Cabernet Sauvignon and premium Malbecs really stood out. Full bodied and flavorful, the wines were really tasty with a little hint of oakiness in the Malbec and smooth fruitiness in the Cabernet. The shiraz was extremely alcoholic: I liked it but everyone else thought it a bit too much on the throat.

We had already bagged one bottle so we decided to stick with that, although we could easily have loaded up 12 bottles of the Malbec for Christmas if we did not have to carry them around South America for another year. Next time.

Our last stop was a family owned olive oil factory called Pasrai, which started in the 1920’s. The name comes from the Spanish and English name for raisins, because they also produce these, sundried tomatoes (which are nowadays dried in ovens) and prunes. They produce 100,000 liters of oil per year which is considered small compared to the commercial factories in the region. Our tour started outside the main factory floor and proceeded inside.

The qualities of the olive oil are varied, from the first pressing to the last. First pressed literally means that the olives were only pressed once to extract the oil. There never is a second pressing of olive oil but the term indicates that it was pressed rather than extracted by other means. Extra virgin olive oil is the best quality you can get, and this means that no temperature was used to extract the oil which diminishes the quality considerably. Olives start off as green, then turn purplish or blue, and finally black. It is the blue olives that are best used for olive oil.

The olive oil was then moved from the press to be cleaned with water. Water is added on top, and as it is heavier than the oil, the oil rises through the water cleaning it, until you have the layer of olive oil on top.

On our way out of the factory we passed a garden with numerous labeled fruit trees, including a wild cherry tree, Japanese persimmon and of course the olive tree.

A tasting room had been readied for us, and inside we were treated to what amounted to a lunch in tasting treats! There were dried raisins, blueberries and other fruits; bread with sundried tomato paste and olive oil, and oils that were flavored with garlic and rosemary. Delicious! There was nothing left at the end.

That was the end of our half day tour, and with the lovely sunshine and great company we felt like we had had a great day. We were poured like puddles into the minivan and headed back to Mendoza.

Once we got back and went to bed early because the next day, the 7th November we went on another all day tour which started at 7.30am. The tour was called the alta montana, or high mountain tour, which headed West on route 7 travelling next to the Rio Mendoza through beautiful valleys, canyons and passes.

Our first stop of the day was at the pretty and man-made Poterillos reservoir which feeds the wineries of the region, where we posed and took photos.

We continued along the winding mountain road, gaining altitude with every kilometer we traveled. The mountains were similar to the colorful Northern valleys we traveled through, but here they were framed by the Andes’ snow-capped peaks.

There was a high plateau we saw, and learned this was formed in the same way as the National Parks we had been to; Talampaya and Ischigualastu. The Pacific Ocean used to cover the continent until the two tectonic plates pushed together to form the Andes. The newly formed mountain range cut the ocean off, and the water gradually seeped down into the ground to form the strange rock shapes and exposing the high ridges. This water eventually became sweet water after being filtered through the rock so much, and eventually the glaciers moved in, cutting a path across the land.

The subsequent rivers were formed and now the melting snow on the mountain tops provides the water for the region. It was across one of these rivers that Argentine hero San Martin marched during his campaigns in the Andes. The bridge is still standing today, although when we visited it, it had only been a short while before that they stopped tourists from walking on it!

We drank from the river here because it was so clear and clean, and then it was on the move again with the tour. The road, which led all the way to Chile and was busy with all sorts of trucks coming and going, ran next to the old narrow gauge railway which went to Chile. It is too dangerous and old to run the trains these days, and the guide said it would cost millions of pesos which the government are not interested in doing. There are numerous old stations along the way, and at one of them a station worker was killed when a glacier caused the river to flood. The water was crashing it’s way towards Mendoza, and the worker stayed at the station to warn the city by radio so they could be prepared. The railway has been permanently closed since 1984.

The further West we found ourselves and the higher we went, the closer we were to the snow on the mountains. Our next stop was in fact at Penitentes, a skiing resort which was closed when we got there (late Spring). They had ski lifts, equipment rental and nice (expensive) looking accommodation. There were also rock walls built into the slopes to protect against rockslides and snow avalanches.

The next stop was a major tourist attraction called Puente de los Incas, or Bridge of the Incans. Our couchsurfing host Juan had told us that this was an amazing place so we had wanted to see for ourselves.

A photogenic natural rock bridge crossing the Rio Cuevas, the bridge got it’s name from visiting Incans who came and used the hot springs located next to it. There are a few theories about how the bridge came about, but one thing is sure – the water at the bridge turns things to stone!

Items, any item such as a shoe, football or plastic toy, can be left in the water for up to 30 days, particularly under the dripping water emanating from the hot springs. The waters actually have a high concentration of salts, and it is this water and air combination that cover the items in iron oxide and calcium carbonate. These accumulate and harden with each layer until the items is completely covered in a stone/rock-like crust so that it looks like it has turned to stone. Amazing!

Charles Darwin crossed the Andes in 1835 at this point and was one of the first people to make scientific observations about the region. In 1917 the hotel that had been built here by an English company built an actual spa and hot springs thermals at the site. It had to be ventilated due to the carbon dioxide which is also emitted with the water. In fact, the water comes from rainwater and melting snow and is heated by pressurization in the volcanic faults underground which forces them back up to the surface. In 1965 a major landslide stopped all further trade at the hotel.

One popular theory of how the colorful bridge came about is an ice avalanche. The ice traveled down the mountain and into the river filling it. Other rock slides followed covering the ice with rock and forming a loose bridge over the ice. The salts and minerals deposited onto the rocks solidified them creating a permanent bridge across the river, which was exposed again once the ice had melted.

Many vendors sell their wares at the bridge including, of course, many items that have been ‘turned to stone’. It was one of the most fascinating natural geological curiosities we had ever seen. A few years before we got there, people could even visit the baths across the bridge, but since a massive snowfall in 2007, the bridge has been declared a no-go area because of the sheer size of weight the snow put on the bridge and the roof of the baths.

The last big draw of our tour was the Aconcagua National Park. I had not heard of this mountain before coming to South America but it is the largest mountain on the continent! It does not compete with mountains in the Himalayas (over 8000 meters), but it is pretty vast at 6960 meters high. It even has it’s own glacier (my first extremely tall mountain and my first glacier al in one!).

We were really lucky with the weather (again), as there were no clouds across the mountains face at all, so we got some great pictures. We were only looking at the mountain, but some people climb it. It takes 3 or 4 days to reach the bottom, let alone climb it, which takes two weeks or more. Books have been written about how to climb this monster, and unfortunately people often go unprepared for how difficult it actually is, thinking it is OK as it is not in Everest’s league. Many people die on Aconcagua’s slopes because of cold weather and lack of oxygen. A reminder of nature’s power – respect it!

Our last stop was the border village of La Cuevas, which was not so much a village as a collection of a few houses, a shop and a restaurant. Only six people live here permanently, and it is the last stop before Chile. Just down the street we could see the tunnel through the mountains which contained border control.

We stopped here for lunch in the chilling mountain winds, and ate our pre-packed lunch we had bought (luckily because the price-gouging here was ridiculous). We did shell out for some warming hot chocolate though which was extremely delicious.

We waited in the minivan for the other tourists to finish their lunches, and I even took some snaps from a few hundred meters above the village in a little shelter that presumably used to be used by people crossing the mountains.

The trip back was pleasant and we stopped again in Uspallata for a technical break. Most people fell asleep on the way back. We got back to Mendoza and managed to take the wrong bus, and then a taxi and then still had to walk back to Juan’s house. However, when we arrived back we got to meet his boyfriend who kindly cooked for us as we all stayed up and talked.

The next day I managed to change lots of dollars before we left, and we went by taxi to the bus terminal to continue our journey further South to Patagonia.