It seems we have left behind the German migrant population of southern Brazil and located the Italian community.
Layne located a winery she wanted to have lunch at just outside the city of Bento Conçalves (“con-sal-ves”) the main population center in the wine valley inland from Porto Alegre.
It’s steep hills and deep canyons and the twisting roads tested our brakes as hard as when we were in the Andes. The villages are basically agricultural centers so the poverty reminds me of the Italy of my youth, not desolate, but a feeling of not being in the forefront of social development.
It’s charmingly picturesque but in the Umbria where I grew up people fled to the cities for opportunity and haven’t gone back to the fields.
The countryside here is lush and green and every home has a vegetable patch or a field of corn growing wherever the land is open enough to take it.
Bike paths for tourists and the well to do out taking their exercise.
We drove up and down following Google’s blue line between Garibaldi and Bento Conçalves lost in a land of Italian, not Portuguese place names in villages clinging to hillsides:
Clear or light mountain in Italian :
Endless vines growing close to 2,000 feet above sea level.
Capanna means shed in Italian.
Borghetto means little village.
Dom Candido’s founder arrived from the province of Trento in northern Italy in 1875 and he got busy growing his grapes.
The winery is located on Via Trento a street name to honor his roots and they take pride in the history of the place.
Even though it no longer appears to be family owned.
We’d never thought of Brazil as a wine producing country but I suppose there is no reason for it not to given an area in this vast country with a suitable climate and soil. So we had a fancy lunch for $20 apiece.
This just shows up as an appetizer tray. Baked polenta in yellow, a potato meat ball of some sort in gray with cheese and salami. There, lunch is done.
Hell no; up next soup:
All this served in a gussied up wine cellar. We got ourselves a bottle of Chardonnay as Friday was baking hot outside. Rusty was under the a/c sleeping during this episode.
We took a booth like this below:
After the soup we got our main course you had a choice between risotto (Layne) or pasta (with mushrooms- me) and a meat, lamb for Layne and picanha Brazil’s national cut of beef for me.
Lamb above and beef below with side plates of mashed potatoes and salad. We had plenty of left overs from all this.
And then the “sobremesa” Portuguese for dessert. Ice cream and wine sauce for Layne:
Sago in a tart berry sauce with custard for me:
It was a luscious meal far removed from van life and camping for a couple of hours.
I think the fact that our van really is our home and comfortable combined with our ability to indulge occasionally makes this less of a vacation or a journey and more of a life lived.
And yes the wines are as you would expect, some we liked and some we didn’t but they are as wide ranging and sophisticated as any anywhere. And I’m no expert but I liked a couple very much.
Layne asks everyone for a photo and she usually gets them.
We don’t have to cram experiences into a set number of days or fear missing out because we have no time limits so after lunch we casually tasted some wines, bought a bottle…
And took a nap under our air conditioning. And Rusty got his walk of course.
Slow paced retirement.
We have to park in the sun to charge our batteries as we can’t use shore power at the moment.
We drove back to Garibaldi foregoing the charms of the big city of Bento Conçalves, population of 120,000 founded in 1875.
The history of this area is as mad as you probably have come to expect, and if I tell you there was a Ragamuffin War here in 1835 I trust you will believe me. Bento Conçalves led a rebellion by that name against the empire of Brazil and proclaimed a republic in Porto Alegre.
The problem as usual was taxes imposed by the central government, in this case of salt and on exports. The region exported salt beef and the taxes meant Argentine and Uruguayan exports could undercut their prices. So they formed a breakaway republic, as you do in this circumstances (consider Philadelphia in 1776).
The Italian trouble maker and future liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi was wandering South America at the time and he got involved helping to declare independence, hence the name of the town where we spent the night.
Eventually things settle down and after the war with Paraguay Brazil created a new state in the far south and encouraged migration from Italy to populate it.
The best space we found to park in Garibaldi is an odd mixed use space organized by the motorists’ association of the town. I never knew such a thing existed.
They have a fenced off area dedicated in part to truck parking, a strip to motorhomes, a playing field and open spaces for dog walking and picnics and wholesome stuff like that. We have electric outlets, drinking water and toilet dump stations all for $10 a night.
It’s difficult to grasp sometimes how easy van life can be in South America. And still no corruption or armed robberies.
Rusty likes it here, especially when I give him a chest rub.
Assis the gate guard age over to chat. Goes spent forty years in Brazil but he’s from Uruguay, literally growing up on the street at the border in another of these open cities. He missed being Brazilian by 50 feet but he’s ended up in garibaldi anyway, but he does obviously speak Spanish.
He retired in 1999 and he likes to go home to see his family in Uruguay. He says it’s more expensive there but much more peaceful than Brazil. My curiosity is piqued. Give it ten days and I hope we’ll find out for ourselves.
