Mendoza Wine Tours

We arrived in Mendoza on a fantastic bus from Andesmar that I will do a full review of later.  It is a pretty city and a lot more clean than Buenos Aires.

We checked into our hotel and had some lunch and then it was off to tour some wineries.

The first winery that we visited was Dante Robino.  It was the more modern, industrial and higher capacity of the two that we visited.  The picture below is how they used to store the wine in barrels, but now that has been turned into this museum portion.

The picture above is the private tasting room of the family that owns the winery.  They keep 300 bottles of each type of wine on hand, I guess in case of a wine emergency.

The second bodega that we toured was much smaller than the first.  It is pictured above and you can see that building on the right looks a bit older than Dante Robino.  This winery is the Cavas de Don Arturo.  Notice there is no link... this is small enough to forego a website altogether.

This winery was much more personal than the first winery and the tour guide, Denise, was much more proficient at English.

At this winery they still complete a lot of the process manually.  This is where the grapes stripped of the leaves and stems before they are crushed and sent to the other building through underground pipes for further processing.

At this winery we ended up purchasing two bottles of Syrah Roble Premium and two bottles of Malbec Roble Premium.  We also bought grape oil, a byproduct they sell.  All of this for about $65 USD, which I thought was quite a deal.

After the winery tours we went to tour an olive oil and food dehydration processing plant named Pasrai.  It was pretty interesting to learn all of the rules behind making extra virgin olive oil.

We took a picture of all of the products they make from olives:  soap, lotion, body oil and other things.

We ended up having a tasting at this place also and big surprise ended up buying some cheap things there also.  We got a three pack of garlic infused olive oil, balsamic vinaigrette,  and balsamic infused olive oil, a dried tomato and olive oil paste and a green olive paste for around $25 USD.

It was an interesting day filled with a lot of tasting.  We met some nice people from the states that were on vacation and it turns out that one of them was actually in Argentina studying to be a Spanish teacher also.

Ciao,

Tim

Uruguay Redux

So, now that the program has ended and I am on vacation time I have switched gears into a bit of a tour guide.  I went back to Colonia, Uruguay but took the faster ferry through Buquebus this time.  We ended up leaving a little late, but it turns out that even though they quote 1:15 minutes to get to Colonia, it probably takes closer to an hour.

The Duty Free shop on the faster ferry was much larger - two floors!  However, you aren't allowed to go on the top deck, so the only view is from the windows.

This time we went to Uruguay it was imperative that we eat at El Drugstore again.  I know I alluded to the delicious food here in my previous blog, but I never got around to writing the review because of my computer problems.  Everything that I have had there has been ridiculously delicious.

El Drugstore

Shrimp in Lemon Sauce

Sweet & Sour Chicken

This time the weather was much better and some of the pictures we were able to get were a little more typical of what people might enjoy about Colonia.  It was easy with a golf cart again to finish all of the sights in one day.  We arrived at 10 a.m. and then our ferry left at 8:30 p.m. which allowed us to view the sunset.

The wind was a little stronger on the second trip.

The sky was a little more clear. 

Sunset with a man and his dog fishing

Sunset

Sunset

Sunset

Sunset

Hope you enjoyed the pictures of the sunset.  Shortly after we returned to the terminal to be processed back to Argentina.  I now have a lot of stamps on my passport...

Ciao,

Tim