Around the World

Today was the day we had both been looking forward to the most, the wine tour (well second for Simon after the BBQ).

It was an early start with the guide picking us up at 8:30am. After driving around the city picking up everyone else from their various hotels we arrived at our first winery, Don Manuel Villafane just before 10am.

Don Manual is a relatively small boutique winery but despite this it seemed like there were miles and miles of vines. The grapes are not grown on a canopy like we originally expected and the way my Grandad used to grow them in his greenhouse. Instead they are grown VSP or vertical standing position. This enables them to control the quality a lot more but means you get a much smaller harvest. When we were driving into the winery we noticed there was a rose at the end of every other row of grapes which they explained to us was an alarm system to protect the harvest from bugs. The bugs would always go for the red roses first so they would know if there was a problem before they started attacking the grapes.

We were then taken into the winery to see the next step in the wine making process. Once the grapes are picked they are crushed and put into steel tanks with yeast. We each got to try some of the Chardonnay they were making in the steel tanks (yes it was only around 10:30am at this point). The wine wasn't finished yet so it was cloudy and tasted a bit strange but it was interesting to try it. The wine stays in the tanks for around 12 months before it is either filtered and bottled or put into French oak barrels to age, depending on what kind of wine they are planning on making. We were shown the cellar with all the oak barrels as well as the bottling and labelling machine. The lady on the bottling machine was sticking the labels on my hand as the machine had broken but this also gives you an idea of how small the winery actually is.

Then on to the fun bit, the wine tasting which we learned is a lot more in depth than we imagined.

Step 1 - You tip the glass slightly and hold it over a white piece of paper to see the true colour of the wine. What we noticed is that the longer the wine has aged in the barrels, the deeper the colour.

Step 2 - Take a sniff and try and find the various scents that the lady was explaining to us.

Step 3 - Swirl the wine around in the glass and smell it again. This should release further flavours (although it pretty much just smelt of red wine).

Step 4 - Check the legs. For those uneducated wine folk like ourselves, you swirl the wine in the glass again and watch to see how long the drops of wine take to fall down the side of the glass. The slower they fall the higher the percentage of alcohol in the wine.

Step 5 - We finally got to actually taste the wine however you had to swill the first mouthful around your mouth to wake up your taste buds, whilst sucking in air (we didn't do that bit for fear of spitting out very expensive wine).

Step 5 - Take a normal sip of wine and try and work out the various flavours.

We tried two different wines during the tasting, a Cabernet Frank which was a reserve and a Merlot which was a grand reserve (what kind of reserve it is depends on how long it has been aged for in the barrel and then the bottle afterwards).

Our second stop was an olive oil farm and factory called Pasrai, where we were shown how they make extra virgin olive oil. After showing us the process we got to taste a number of the olive oils they make:

- Extra virgin olive oil drizzled on bread

- Olive oil infused with orange in bread (this was incredible, we are going to have to try and hunt some down when we get home)

- Olive oil infused with garlic drizzled on bread

- White bread with green olive paste drizzled with basil olive oil

- White bread with tomato paste drizzled with oregano olive oil

- White bread with a sun dried tomato on top (even Si thought this was delicious however he has been suffering from a cold / feather duvet allergy so perhaps he couldn't actually taste it)

- White bread with black bean paste

Pasrai also made dried fruits so for dessert we had some delicious sultanas, raisins and chocolate covered raisins (we ate a lot of these).

We then headed off to our second winery, Luigi Bosca, a second and third generation, family run business. This is considered a medium sized winery so was a lot bigger than Don Manuel Villafane. It's also considered a DOC for Malbec. To put this into context only 4 out of roughly 1000 wineries in Mendoza have this title. It is to do with the way the entire process is controlled to a very high specification.

We had another tour of the winery and learnt a bit about their history before moving on to some more tasting. We got to try:

- La Linda, which was a young Chardonnay which smelt very sweet like passion fruit but was incredibly dry. They call this wine 'the liar' (it sounded a lot better in Spanish) because of this.

- One of their Signature wines which was a Cab Sav mixed with Malbec. Each barrel is used for around 4/5 years before it is sold. It is therefore used around 3/4 times. This wine was made in a French oak barrel that was in its second use. It was then aged for 1 year. They used a 50/50 mix of 2 different types of grapes from different places. The grapes are aged separately and then they make the blend before maturing in the bottle for 6 months.

- Gala no 1 (a celebration wine that was 85% Malbec and 15% something I can't remember) aged for 14 months in French oak and in the bottle for one year.

- Our last wine was an incredibly sweet dessert wine. It is so sweet as it is made from a late harvest of grapes. The grapes are German but grown in Mendoza. The wine literally tasted of apple juice.

Our third and last winery was Alta Vista which is run by two French brothers. The winery was gorgeous and we were shown to tables in the garden where we would have a picnic style lunch which of course was accompanied by more wine.

We had drunk a lot of wine by this point so we have no idea what any of the wines were called but we do know that they were delicious and our glasses (we had three lined up at one point) were never empty.

We do however remember the food which was amazing. To start we had 3 delicious empanadas, one vegetable in some yummy spices, a beef and chilli and a blue cheese and leek. This was followed by a really tasty beef and vegetable stew, in which the beef fell apart in your mouth and was cooked in wine of course. For dessert we had a selection of mini puddings: a forest fruits mousse on a shortbread type biscuit, a passion fruit mousse on a shortbread type biscuit, two different chocolates and a very lemony macaroon. It was lovely to eat in the garden in the sunshine.

After lunch they gave us a tour of the winery which was very interesting. Apparently you can buy their wine in Sainsbury's in the U.K. so next time you're shopping have a look out for a bottle of Alta Vista, you won't be disappointed.

That brings us to our end of our stay in Mendoza however Val (our Airbnb host) had one job for us, we had to take a selfie with Buffy and Mancini. Whilst the cats were very friendly, they apparently weren't a great fan of selfies as you will see from our picture.Read more