Mas Mendoza.

I uploaded some pics of Mendoza HERE

Friday I headed out for a tour of a Mendoza province called Maipu which is widely regarded as the cradle of wine in Argentina. I stopped in two distinctly different bodegas. One was a family affair(Bodega Famiglia) and the other was a mid tier producer. The family bodega produced nearly 1,000 Litres of Wine per anum, primarily Malbec while the larger producer is responsible for almost 4,0000 Litres. The former was named La Cave Don Arturo. The first thing you notice about this Bodega is the host giving the wine tour, a young beautiful Argentine woman from a well to do family. The vines themselves were fairly uneventful as it is Winter now but being led through the production process was interesting. The bodega employs no netting above the vineyard to protect the vines so they are at the mercy of the Free Masons who control the weather machine in Washington DC. I mentioned the threat of hail storms to which she simply replied that the fine netting had a detrimental affect on sugar maturation within the grapes. The hail storms in Mendoza are a serious business, hail the size of eggs is not uncommon and if you get hit hard it can easily decimate an entire vineyard. She explained that this was a precautionary measure they were willing to forgo in the name of integrity. God I just love idealists. The grapes are hand harvested which translates into many minions armed with nothing more than a pair of scirrors who cut only the best of the best for production.

From here the grapes are dumped into an industrial thresher which chews up the grapes separating the juice from skins and seeds. These three parts are then sent to fermentation tanks. Important is the fact it is the skins, seeds and grape juice existing here. This is called "maceration" it is where the wine takes on its structure, color from the dye of the skins and various aromas. From here the wine is sent for cooling and stabilizing. This is done in giant concrete vaults. They will spend two to four weeks here. It is important during this phase that the temperature of the vaults is carefully controlled and monitored otherwise you will end up with vinegar. This is essentialy a desert environment and they use a pressurized irrigation technique whereby the intake the water from the Medoza River which is Andes run off and pump it into a water tanks not unlike what you see on the rooftops of Manhattan apartment buildings. From here the water runs in pipes that wrap around the cooling and stabilization vaults. These pipes are actually a pipe within a pipe the inner pipe sends the wine in one direction and the outer pipe sends cool mountain water in the opposite direction. The wine will cool as it passes in the opposite direction much like how your car radiator works. After a pass through the cooling pipes the same water is sent out to irrigate the new grape producing vines and nothing is wasted. Oh efficiency!

The family bodega at no point adds yeast for the fermentation process. The yeast is indigenous and is what is found in the air and collects on the outer skin of the grape in the form of must. There is a problem here though if a particular season is a rainy one it will wash all the must off which is responsible for the spontaneous fermentation. When I asked how they dealt with this situation since refusing to add a yeast to the fermentation process to compensate for this loss of must produces sub-par wines she simply replied "we have our good vintages and our bad vintages."

Anyway from the cooling and maturation tanks if it is a "a young wine" it will be bottled almost immediately otherwise the wine will be filled into 20 Litre Canadian or French Oak barrels where it will spend almost 2 years before being bottled and subsequently released.

Curiously this Family Bodega is also devoid of the use of sulfites. Sulfites are added to wine in order to give them a longer cellar life and keep oxygenation from destroying them. A wine without sulfites has a maximum life of no more than 10 years. What's the point in cellaring wine anyway? Unless you are some stodgy WASP collector drink that stuff already!

Interestingly enough this Bodgega does not sell in Argentina everything is exclusively exported to the US. The value of a bottle here is about 15 pesos or 5 dollars but in the US it regularly turns up on wine lists for $50.00! Shark idealists indeed. They were doing well enough without my having to purchase anything but they really have something going with these beautiful girls leading the tours that makes one feel compelled to purchase something.

The other Bodega was an insipid industrial affair ho hum. Although the tour guide was equally as beautiful as the previous one the whole thing just smacked of industrialism and lack of soul. They might as well have been making ball-peen hammers.

Following that I paid a visit to an olive oil factory. The tour was Catellano only and I think I understood most of what she was saying but the environment was as aseptically clean and sterile as an operating room and I soon lost interest. I did manage to find out the difference between virgin olive oil and extra virgin olive oil though. So if you don't know it comes down to acidity. Extra has less than one percent of acidity and virgin had between 1 and 2 percent. Everything else is apparently crap.

Anyway Maipu is beautiful. Vines and fruit groves everywhere sitting under the specter of the intimidating snow-capped Andes. Very chilled out people, lots of distance and many pick up trucks. I hope to retire here.

I spent my last day in Mendoza hiking around Parque San Martin which is a beautiful parke designed by Carlos Thays who is more or less the Frederick Law Olmstead of Argentina. I would easily say it rivaled Central Park for an urban park. I think every deciduous tree in the region was represented there. Cool mountain streams from the from the Andes above flowed freely and seemingly everywhere. The smells alone were enough to make you lose your sense of self. The weather was made to order for a Saturday afternoon - a serene 60 degrees. It was truly one of those "It's good to be alive" type of days.

C.