Mendoza: Bicycle Tour

 The land of bikes and wine is a nearby town called Maipú. (Having lived in Buenos Aires, I started to realize that Argentina obsessively recycles street and town names. No, towns don’t have a main street. But they almost all have an Uruguay street, or a Maipú, or a Yrigoyen. Every province and town pulls its name from a very limited set of sources: Argentinean presidents, nearby countries, and Argentinean provinces. Occasionally I’ll be surprised by a John F. Kennedy street, but never something so useful as School Street, or even anything as descriptive as Fountain Road. Someone, somewhere, is just not trying).

Visiting places dedicated to getting you tipsy, or at least show you a good way to get tipsy later, and in between traveling around on a vehicle entirely dedicated to balance sounded charming. And it was. Fortunately, the travel time between wineries was long enough that I never got really affected, though some other tourists did. (For the most part, Stephanie and I biked around alone, though occasionally we met up with other tourists making the same popular trip. Being foreigners together makes people amazingly friendly).

The places to go

            1. Our first stop was Museo del Vino La Rural, a free museum that gave us a tour of the history of wine making, their own groves, and finished off with a glass of their home-made (well, museum-made) wine. This sweet red wine was one of my favorites from the trip. Both informative and experiential, with a lot to see, this museum was a good place to start of the trip. Especially because I didn’t drink wine often, and really didn’t know anything about it except that it somehow makes you classy.

History

Here’s what I’ve learned about wine (from Museo del Vino La Rural and Familia Di Tomaso tours). Wine – and grapes – came over to Argentina from Europe, notably with Jesuit missionaries in the 1560s. The Spanish brought the first wine, but the French brought the grapes used to make Malbec, Argentina’s most famous variety.

Originally, grapes would be picked by hand and collected in large leather sacks, which didn’t coddle the grapes very well, and let a lot get smushed, and the remaining grapes would be juiced by being stamped on. Later, around 1850, they upgraded to scissors to cut grapes off the vines, and hand-cranked machines to crush the grapes and extract the juice.

            It takes about 2 kilos of grapes to make one bottle of wine, although of course, the amount varies by the type of wine. Red wine uses both the skins and the juice, while white wine only uses the juice (hence the light color). Nowadays the left over skins are used as fertilizers or to make oils.

Is it good?

Wine quality varies based on how the ratio of skin and juice used, how much of the sugar’s been let turn into alcohol (you can rate on how sweet it is, how smooth it is, and on how fast it gets you drunk), and what kind of oak (if any) has been used to age it.

Growing

Roses are planted at the front of each row of grape plants to act as basically the canary in the mine. If the rose plant starts to die, chances are you’ve got a pest that will attack your grapes next. One grape plant, at least in regards to Malbec, is good for 50 years. After that, it loses its sugar content.

Aging

Argentina has no oak of its own, and imports from the US and France, and, to a lesser extent, China. Wine ages as it is allowed access to air, which is granted by the space between the barrel’s slats and by the pores in the cork. (This is why wine bottles are stored pointing down, so the wine stays in contact with the cork). Admittedly, the more it’s exposed to air, the sooner it turns to vinegar, but with barrels and corks, the affect here is negligent. If you deliberately don’t want wine to age, you can use a plastic cork. Don’t think you can dump your wine in your basement then pull it out decades later. Malbec wine only last 3-5 years before it becomes vinegar.

The oak also gives extra flavor and aroma to the wine, which really does a lot for the experience. To give a smokier flavor to the wine, wineries might toast the wood. French oak adds flavors of tobacco and coffee, while American offers vanilla and coco. (French oak is actually stronger and harder than American, another tidbit useful in distinguishing them). Some makers will mix the wood in their barrels, alternating slats of each tip of oak.

            Proto-wine, my term for the juice (and perhaps skin) mixture that hasn’t yet become a drink, needs to sit until 25% off its sugar becomes alcohol. It takes about 20 days for white proto-wine to mature to real wine status, and needs to be kept at 10 degrees Celsius. Red wine ferments in about 10-15 days, at 20 or 25 degrees Celsius (room temperature). The temperature of the wine rises during fermentation.

The process seems interesting, and if it didn’t take so long/cost so much (I wouldn’t bother if I didn’t have oak), I’d try my hand at wine-making.

2.             We next stopped at Entre Olivos, which had tastings of olive oils, jams, dulce de leche, and other spreads. Many of their spreads were fantastic, especially a coconut dulce de leche. The place also included liquor tasting in the price. Some of the flavors were nicely sweet and thick, but we were surprised to realize they went down a little rough. The best (smoothest) liquors we tasted in Mendoza were offered at just a random artisanal booth in a median in the city street.

3.  Our next stop was Familia di Tomaso, recommended to us by the bike rental place. This stop was particularly great because, in addition to a brief tour of the winery, which seems to have been in the family for generations, they sat us down and showed us how to taste wine. First, they brought out an un-aged Malbec. Smell it, then swirl it around and smell it again, our guide told us. Now you’ve released the alcohol scent. Our guide described the Malbec as a fruity red wine, with a light flavor of plums and other fruits. They followed it up with a Malbec aged 6 months, which simply had more to it. The scent was spicier and the flavor fuller, smoother, and more subdued, with darker undertones. In one of the other wines, he told us to notice the tannins. This compound, found in the grape skins, dries out the inside of your mouth. I did feel a dryness or a puckering inside my mouth, but that could easily just be due to drinking so much wine. We also tried a dessert wine, which most of the tourists loved; to me it tasted like the cough syrup I had as a kid.

4.  We stopped by a few others, but at some point, all wineries seem the same. They all offer tastings of the classic wines like Malbec, and a tour. We decided not to explore many of the wineries, as we’d already got a fair education in.

 We stopped at just one more winery (I think it was Trapiche). This one gave us 4 full glasses of wine to split. I jotted down notes as I tasted, because for me, I process the experience better and pay more attention if I’m trying to explain it. Merlot was a dark red wine, thicker than Mablec, with a richer, although bitter flavor. It was less fruity than Malbec as well. For comparison we tried a light purple wine called Syrah. The flavor was lighter as well, lighter than Malbec, and acidic and citrusy. None of the wines we’d had that day had been white, so we ordered Torrentes and Chardonnay. Torrentes we were obliged to try, because it’s unique to Argentina. I didn’t particularly like either of these; they just seemed to have less flavor than the reds (but Stephanie insists these were poor samples). The Torrentes was a light gold, and bitter. It had a weaker flavor than the Chardonay, which tasted slightly acidic and smelled slightly fruity.

5.  Our final stop was Historias and Sabores which did not have much in the way of historias, but held through on the sabores (flavors) promise. I was still curious in liquors so we stopped here to try a few and try their spreads. It was a picturesque little place, with a patio outside the small storefront, and a view into their garden and grape vines. Their most interesting item: a thick syrupy Malbec spread.

All in all, I feel like my Mendoza trip was a lot of trying food, and wandering outside. A nice relaxing break after farming, and a nice way to end my time in Argentina. The next night I spent on a bus back to Buenos Aires, then I hit the airport insanely, irrationally early, and returned to the USA on an overnight flight.

Travelers’ Tips:

Bicycle Tour

Mendoza is famous for its wine, and, in the tourism world, almost as famous for its biking-wine tours. There are a few ways you can go about this: you can pay your hostel to “organize” the trip, or you can go straight to the nearby town of Maipú and do it yourself. Back to useful information: at least with my hostel, what you get when you pay is a car to come pick up you (and anyone else paying for the same service) and drive you to Maipú, pick you up again the end time the service has chosen, and rent you your bicycle. It’s honestly just a waste of money. Your other option is to take a normal city bus  (number 173) to Maipú (costing about AR $2), and once there, rent the bike yourself from one of the numerous shops. It’s been a while since the trip, so my memory for prices may be off, but I believe the organized trip cost about AR$90 and the bike rental itself only AR $25.

I rented a bike from a place called Mr. Hugo, which is immediately across the street from the bus stop. The bikes were pretty good and the seats relatively easy to adjust by yourself. I saw helmets there, which I presume they’ll give if you ask; I honestly just forgot. Some bikes had a basket in the front, so if you didn’t bring a backpack and want to pick up souvenirs, that’s a good option.  They give you a glass of wine at the end of your trip, and a brief map of places at the beginning.

Most bodegas (wineries) cost AR $20 for tasting and a tour.

If you’re hungry for empanadas, stop by the Beer Garden off of Mitre street: they’re made fresh and in meat and vegetarian varieties. Be prepared to wait though.