First Wine Tour

Saturday, April 5 – Day 110

I decide to celebrate my birthday with an upscale wine tour. I was referred to Ampora Wine Tours by the people at The Vines of Mendoza, a great wine bar in the city. They offer two different tours, and I’m going to do the Uco Valley tour which includes 3 wineries and a gourmet lunch.

The first is a large production winery called Andeluna. The facilities are relatively new but it looks like a classic winery. The land had previously been in the hands of one the oldest wine families for generations, and some of the vines are 80 years old. Both the grounds and the building are stunning, and host says that the main building was built in only a year, which sounds a little suspicious – I don’t think that anyone could build a structure this nice in three years. Turns out this place is owned by the Lay family – as in Frito Lay. So they just hired four times the typical work force and worked 7 days a week until it was done. As beautiful as the building was, the scenery was even more beautiful. And of course, the wines were awesome.

The mountains in the pictures are part of the Plata (Silver) mountain range, a sub-section of the Andes. The tall peak in the background is Cerro Tupungato. It’s name means “balcony to the sky”, and at 6,570 meters (just over 20,000 feet), the summit of this is volcano is only a few hundred feet short of Aconcagua, which is the highest peak in South America and only about a hundred kilometers away.

The second winery, Azul, is just a tiny little concrete building. Here, a couple of really good wine makers are competing with the money crowd, and their wines are just a good. O. Fournier, the third stop, is one of the most interesting wineries I’ve ever seen. The design is ultra-modern and it is set up so that, from start to finish, the wine moves through the production process by gravity.

The restaurant is the smaller building, and has glass walls that look out to the mountain range. The owner’s wife is the chef, and this is where we’re having lunch. At first, I thought that this was just a really wealthy family that can afford to do this as an indulgence. But both the wine and the food were excellent.

This turned out to be such a great trip that I signed up to do their other tour in a couple of days. Later in the evening, I went to a New Orleans jazz performance with a group of people from the hostel. The promotional flyer touted the band as “the best Argentine jazz band that has toured America”. And actually, they were very good.