Wine tasting

We were picked up from our hotel in a minibus along with seven others and taken to a series of small wineries.

First up was one which got very good marks in some magazine or other and they seemed a bit pretentious about the whole thing to me. It was nice, new and clean; but when they started yabbering on about yield density and other things, I wondered if they really didn't just decide to do everthing as 'perfectly' as possible just to dare the wine community to say it ended up tasting crap (which it may or may not have done - I don't know).

Anyway - as it was our first stop - we were instructed in a way of tasting wine. We tasted a few. They tasted like wine.

There was one set of three bottles that supposedly had the same grapes; treated the same way; blended the same way etc etc, but from different places in the valley. The idea was that you can taste the difference in the terroir. Who knows?

Not me, that's for sure.

Ah, yes! Red Wine

(at 9.00am, whilst a little -ahem- delicate.)

We then went to another winery which wasn't even open properly. It was on a much larger scale and, as we were told, designed with typical Swiss attention to detail. Apparently the layout was a wine-makers dream. We walked past some fellas in one room and were told in hushed tones that he was one of the top winemakers in Argentina. Our guide knew his face from wine magazines. He was drinking wine - I bet he could taste some differences.

More tasting - this time with an amazing view to break up the monotony of trying to taste anything important about each of the different wines.

A view of the Andes

Come to think of it, endless pictures of the same thing (e.g. the Andes) and endless different types of the same thing (i.e. Red Wine) have alot in common - only of interest to a select few.

We had a lovely lunch (apart from the bored and pretty much useless staff) with five courses and a different wine with each. This time we were allowed one glass-ette of white.

After luncheon, our last stop was at a very small winery belonging to a local winemaker - Carmello Patti. Now he seemed to really enjoy what he was doing and also seemed to have a real affinity for his product. It was a really pleasant change from the previous sterile environments. He also had a kitten. Everyone except us bought wine from him. Maybe because it was the end of the tastings, or maybe it was his charm, but his wine did seem pretty popular.

Carmello and a bottle or two

We returned to Tapiz to get our bags

Pinot Noir

Finally, we went into Mendoza to recover before setting off early for Valparaiso.