Soldiering On

Monday 8 August 2016 

The next day we had a bit of free time before heading back out to the wineries, so we decided to go for a walk around town. Before we left Australia, someone mentioned that we should go to the local market and try the empanadas. Mendoza city is designed around a grid pattern, with a number of nice squares that ring the main plaza (apparently the city layout was designed following a large earthquake and the squares were built into the fabric of the city as an evacuation place for people in the event that the city suffered any more large quakes). After a short walk down through the pretty tree-lined streets, we arrived at our destination. Its always interesting to visit markets when you’re on holidays because you get a much better feeling for how the people there live (not to mention that you get to see some pretty interesting types of foods). Of course when we found the empanada shop, Michelle just had to buy some – we needed some breakfast after all.

We just made it back to our apartment in time to drop off the empanadas before heading off on another day of wine and food. This time we had reserved a tasting at the Mendel winery. We had previously tried some of the wines from Mendel back in Melbourne during the ‘Malbec world day’ and wanted to try them when we were here. We both agreed that having the tour of Mendel was one of the most enjoyable wine tours and tastings that we’ve ever experience. Mendel is not a large winery and its not a fancy winery in the sense of monumental architecture, but what it does have is simply amazing wine. Our host, Silvana, was fantastic. We had such a good time we got stuck there longer than our itinerary had allowed for, so we were late for lunch again.

Lunch was booked at El Enimigo in the Maipu district – this winery is an offshoot of the more famous Catena Zapata (which we would be visiting the next day) and is a new project from Alejandro Vigil and Adrianna Catena. On arrival we happened to be met by Alejandro himself, which was a bit of a treat for wine geeks like us. We were there for the food, but of course there’s always going to be wine when you visit a winery for lunch. We had a choice of mains, Michelle going for the steak, Trevor going for the rabbit.

Turns out Trevor made the right choice as it was the best thing he’d eaten since arriving in Argentina (which says a lot considering all the gourmet food we’d had). Michelle’s steak on the other hand, while very tasty was just ginormous, I mean maybe 700 grams – not sure who could actually get through that much meat.

After lunch we had yet another winery to visit, this time Pulenta Estate, which is just near the boundary between Lujon de Cuyo and the Uco Valley. Here again, the architecture was pretty amazing. The owners had the Argentinian dealership for Porsche and Ferrari, so they had a bit of money to spend on making the winery look pretty cool. We had a tour of the wine making facilities and then we got down to the business of drinking wine. After having the pre lunch wines, the wines with lunch and now having before us another line up of fabulous wine, we hate to admit it, but we were a bit knackered and it was a struggle to get through the wine – but we put our best foot forward and solidered on. Again, we got in the car and passed out for the drive home (followed by a siesta of course). For dinner, we’d had a few recommendations to try Ceibo, which luckily for us was just a few blocks from our apartment. The place has a great wine list (of course) and the food has a real focus on local Mendocinian fair. We started with empanadas, which were delicious and for mains Trevor had a goat pie and Michelle had the salmon pasta, but surprisingly the best thing we had was the pear and fig salad which was delicious. We washed it all down with a bottle of Altos Las Hormigas 2012 Malbec which was from one of the wineries that we had tried to visit, but alas had no facilities to handle visitors – at least we got to taste their fabulous wine.