Wine Country
The school hosted an afternoon of wine-tasting, with one of the local experts, which we participated in.
These after-class activities are intended to provide language practice, but they are great fun.
In Cuenca, our first South American home, we took the school tour around the city centre. Aside from the barest of basic data, it may as well have been self-guided. The Spanish flowed freely over our heads but did not penetrate our skulls.
Now that we have a few more Spanish words in our lexicon, we can participate in extracurricular activities in Spanish.
It was a happy combination of the vocabulary of grape growing, wine production, flavours and scents and practical application (a.k.a drinking). It was conducted totally in Spanish. There was a range of Spanish mastery in the class, but between us (and our dictionaries), we were perfectly comfortable.
The school hosts a week-long course on wine tasting and production with daily tours to various bodegas near the city, but Tom fears for the health of our livers. Instead, we decided to explore the bodegas on our own.
So, on Saturday, we jumped on the bus to the Maipu wine district—about 15 km from where we are staying–and rented bicycles for the day. The bus system in Mendoza is remarkably efficient – well-maintained buses roar in all directions at short intervals. To pay, you swipe a smart-card when you board the bus, and the reader hands you a receipt that tells you how much credit is left.
The bikes were heavy duty workhorses, but that was probably a good thing given the main focus of the day.
Our first stop was the wine museum for a short tour. The history of wine making in the area and some of the handmade implements were on display. Interestingly, they had us sample a wine produced especially for tourists rather than a more typical vintage of the area. The tourist wine was selling for 90 Argentine pesos for 6 (about $5 a bottle). We passed on this bargain priced, but very drinkable table wine and headed for other wineries.
We particularly enjoyed our visit to the award winning Tomassi winery. It is a family-run winery with roots dating back to 1869.
The wineries here are huge, much larger than we are used to in the Niagara region, there seem to be vast tracts of suitable land. Tomassi is tiny, but it still exports wines around the world.
The same wine will be labelled in many different ways, the wines for the local markets have a simple, traditional white label with black lettering, but those for exports are much more diverse. Red and gold for China (where white cannot be used, it is the color of death), jazzy red-on-black with twist-tops for the US and UK youth market, etc..
Some of the early machinery decorated the restaurant, all hand forged chains and wooden gears. An electric motor was strapped to a bucket-brigade contraption that hoisted crushed grapes into the fermentation vats, the original design would have used a steam engine. The owner who showed it to us said that they used to burn the dried remains of the fermentation to power the steam – and we could almost imagine the sweet smells and sounds on a warm sunny day like this one.
We left our lunch order with the restaurant, and went off to do a tasting, postponing the important decision about which wine to have with lunch until after we had sampled the wares.
We chose to sit out in a sun dappled patio. We passed on dessert (which had been created with all of the notes of the dessert wine that accompanied it)–maybe on our way back later that day. While we in Ontario stress our grapes with cold temperatures to make ice wine, here they simply stop irrigating the grapes to concentrate the flavours.
We left reluctantly–the owner was a delightful host who went out of his way to show us his bodega.
We wended our way past olive groves and made a stop at an oliveria. We were surprised at how inexpensive extra virgin olive oil and assorted olive pastes were ($5 USD for a half-litre of top-quality olive oil), but were not tempted to stock up and cart bottles around for the next few months.
Our final stop on Saturday was a chocolate and flavours boutique. They made liquors and savoury products in addition to a variety of chocolates. It was a hard decision indeed—which chocolate liquor was better—the chocolate cafe, the chocolate hazelnut, the chocolate banana…. We tasted about a dozen flavors – hard work, but someone has to do it.
We fell in love with the dolce de leche combined with coffee flavour, and rode happily back to the bike shop with a stock in Tom’s backpack. Sorry, you shouldn’t expect any to be left by the time we return to Toronto.
There is a uniquely Argentine expression of endearment that we now understand: “Sus mi dolce de leche” (you are my…).
All in all, a day full of sweetness.