The day that I had arrived in Mendoza coincided with a national 5 day long weekend holiday, and the start of the city’s annual wine festival.  What a time to arrive – this was going to be fun !!! 

The flip side to this was in the practicalities, and arrival in a new city mean’t that my first job was finding somewhere to stay.  This took me a while as I cycled from place to place only to keep being told that the hotel was full.  On the 8th or 9th attempt I found a hostal with a room and then found that they didn’t take cards.  

I spent the next 30 minutes trying to find an ATM that had cash as they all seemed to have run out of money!!! (It wasn’t just me there were  lots of people in the same boat) In the end I gave up and cycled back to the hotel to tell them I would pay the next day which they were fine with.

By the time that I had finally gotten a shower and ready to go out it was gone 10pm which in any other country may be an unusual time to head out for dinner but in Argentina it was still early. The guy on reception said that the food/going out street in the centre of Mendoza was Aristides Villanueva.  As it was a few kilometers from where I was staying I cycled there.

When I cycled through the centre of town the party was just getting going, and all through the city buildings had been lit up and artists were performing on the street.

When I arrived the road was full of bars and restaurants and I had no trouble getting a table at a parrilla restaurant as the locals had still not come out for dinner.  I had arrived at about 10.30pm and there were only two other tables eating.  By the time I left at midnight all of the 30 or so tables were full with people eating !!!!

It was now time to go and find the wine festival and as I cycled back into the centre I bumped into JD, who is a cyclist from Canada who must by know think that I’m stalking him as every city that I have stopped in we have gone out for a beer. He was out drinking with Veronica, from Buenos Aires, who was staying at the same hostal that JD was.

The main centre for the wine festival was street in the centre which was closed off and they had set up a couple of hundred metres of marquee tents where about 50 different wineries in the region were serving wine. 

The idea was that for 150 pesos you got a wine glass and a card that you could use to try 6 different wines. After each glass that you received the server was meant to mark the card to show that you had received one of your 6 glasses. None of the staff were marking the cards and JD had bought his card the previous night and was back for more.

I got myself a glass and joined them trying the wines and the 3 of us shared JD’s card.  As long as when you walked up to the different servers with a wine grass with the logo of the event on nobody seemed to care.  For the next couple of hours we drank free wine and had a great night.

It was another very late night by the time I crawled into bed and in the morning I had one hell of a stonking hangover!!!  

I had planned to cycle out of Mendoza that day to the wine area of Maipu which lay about 20km south of the city (most people have probably heard of Mendoza when it comes to red wine but Mendoza is the main city and most of the wineries are further south in Maipu).    

That plan was now well and truly out of the window and all I wanted was hangover food and the nearest fast food place was Mcdonalds.  The amazing thing about Mcdonalds in Mendoza was that I could have bought a bottle of wine with my burger and fries

Although I was tempted, hair of the dog and all that, I wasn’t sure that more red wine that early would cure my hangover.

As it was a long weekend holiday in Argentina all of the shops were shut and so after eating my Mcdonalds breakfast and finding the city shut I headed to Subway for a late lunch and bumped into JD again whose head was in a similar state. He was leaving the next day and heading over the Andes towards Santiago so we arranged to meet up again when I got there in a few days time.

As everywhere apart from the fast food places was shut/having a siesta I headed back to the hotel to watch the 6 nations rugby matches that had been played that weekend. England were playing Italy, although after watching the match I’m not sure how much rugby was played given Italy’s tactic of not committing players to the ruck.  As such there could be no offside which made for a very weird game with Italian players flooding into the English backline. 

Despite Italy’s tactics they still lost and so the title decider game could still be the England v Ireland match on Saint Patrick’s Day weekend in mid March. After watching the rugby I headed for a snooze and by the time that I was ready to head out for dinner it was again gone 10pm. 

When I had left the hotel I decided that a quiet night was on the cards as I wanted to visit Maipu the following day and spent the night walking around listening to the live bands which were once again entertaining the crowds in the city centre.

One thing led to another though and I ended up sharing a bottle of wine with some locals and it was gone 2am by the time I got to bed.  Before sleeping, I set the alarm on my phone as my time in Argentina was running out and in 2 days time I had to be cycling over the Andes Mountains so needed to get to Maipu in the morning otherwise it wasn’t going to happen.

For my final night in the wine region I wanted to sleep at a winery and over breakfast I booked a room at the Bodega Cassa Cecchin. (plus by booking the hotel it made sure that I got on the bike and cycled to Maipu)

The road out of the Mendoza was more like a motorway than the quiet country lanes that I had been expecting and as I reached the outskirts of Maipu I still hadn’t seen a winery. Up ahead was a YPF petrol station so I pulled in to use their wifi to check where the Bodega’s were, I honestly never thought that they would be that hard to find, and to get a coffee. As I walked into the café guess who I saw – yep JD who was heading for the border with Chile.

After enjoying a coffee it was time to say adios to JD for one final time

Having checked the map it was time to go and drink wine.  It turned out that the Bodega that I had booked for the night was only a couple of kilometers away so I decided to head there first to drop my bags off.

The entrance was a long driveway through the vines 

In among the vines there were lots of Olive trees

The drive led to the winery which was still housed in the original building that was built in 1898. 

The winery is one of the few in the area that is truly organic  – click here to watch a short video on the owners philosophy of the benefits that organic farming brings to flavour of wine.   

My room turned out to be more like a small house with a lounge area and the biggest bath in the world.

The view out of the window overlooked the vines and I don’t think that it could have been any more perfect, especially as in the lounge there was a bookcase full of wine to choose from.  

All throughout the vines old machinery added an extra touch of beauty

 

Included in the price of the room was a private wine tasting of the wineries top wines which Renso was going to conduct for me (I turned down the tour and just went straight to the tasting!!!) 

To give you a better idea of the setting here is a video that I shot prior to the tasting:

For the tasting there was a white wine, a rose (red wine grapes with the skins removed after 2 days) and 3 reds – a Malbec, a Sauvignon and a Shiraz.   Renso knew his stuff and was able to talk at length about the subtle differences between the wines and the reason for different characteristics that each grape variety has.  Most of it was lost on me but by the end I was tasting peaches, cherries, plums berries and spices, although the taste of bananas and pineapple was not included in my palate !!!! 

Just as I was finishing my tasting a tour group that had been visiting the winery came in.  Two people from the  joined me as they wanted to do a tasting too – Daniel from Italy and Louisa from England.  It turned out that Daniel was a fellow cyclist and earlier on his trip had cycled the Carretera Austral in Chile.  Once finished he had sent his bike by courier to Mendoza and was enjoying a few weeks of backpacking by bus.  

What he hadn’t planned on was that when he arrived in Mendoza he wouldn’t be able to collect his bike as the post office was closed for the 5 day holiday.  He was hoping that it would be open the next morning as he had booked a bus to Santiago as he had a flight to catch.

Daniel and Louisa had got a bus over from Mendoza and hired bukes to cycles around the Bodega’s. Once we had finished the wine tasting we decided to head off together in search of more wine and cycled back towards the centre of Maipu to visit Bodega Lopez .

When we arrived it was close to 5pm and the gates to the Bodega were shut.  The security guard came over and we explained that we wanted to do a tasting.  He radioed reception to say that 3 cyclists wanted to do a degustation and they said okay and the security guard let us in.

The winery was huge and unlike Cassa Cecchin was more like a wine factory that produced something like 40 million litres of wine per year. 

When we walked in there were other people waiting for the final tour of the day which Daniel joined but Louisa and I headed straight for the tasting.  This place didn’t charge for either the tour or the tasting which turned out to be a great end to my wine adventure in Argentina.

It was then time for us to leave and I cycled with them to drop their bikes off at the rental place before they caught a bus back to Mendoza.  It had been a great day of wine tasting with great company and I cycled back to Bodega Cecchin with a very content smile on my face.

I had bought myself a lovely bottle red at the final Bodega and drank it back in my little house in the middle of the vines.

Here is a video to show just how special the place I was staying was:

The next morning breakfast was served al fresco at a table in the vines which was a wonderful end to my Argentinian wine adventures

My stay also marked the beginning of the end of my time in Argentina as that morning when I left I would be starting my ride over the Andes Mountains to Chile.

Over breakfast I could see the snow capped mountains that I needed to climb peeping over the top of the vines, and I can assure you that they didn’t look small.

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Time for wine, Mendoza, Argentina
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