Wine And Oil

Before we came to Mendoza there was a fantasy I had about us sitting out in a vineyard sipping Malbec and eating grilled meat. It hasn’t quite worked out like that. But cheese and wine…

We liked the 59N which means fifty nine “novias” or girlfriends because that was the number the owners grandfather claimed to have. Go figure but it was a pleasant light red. 

Layne loves the wine tasting routine and here you pick your winery, the formal corporate places or the smaller family run outfits. 

This one uses cement eggs to store their wine which they say imparts a particular flavor to the grape. Never seen that before but the Malbec was light and fresh so maybe…moving on:

…then we tasted olive oil at a huge scenic corporation which claims to be number one, whatever that means. 

This place was pretty fancy and I wondered if shorts would matter. We’d spoken to one US overlander who ride his motorcycle to a winery and was told his riding pants didn’t meet their standard. No Wine for You. 

In fact they turned out to be easygoing and friendly. Layne had a plan as always shed that wasn’t lunch outside under an umbrella. I’d have been okay with that! 

You got to walk through the sales rooms at will and taste the various oils and vinegars. 

Take your own spoon and pour in some oil and see if you like it. And the same with the vinegar. 

We had a tasting plate to try done of their olives and assorted vegetable pastes and stuff. 

The staff speak English and were really cool to us old farts. 

Rusty was snoozing aboard GANNET2, which is a well insulated space with lots of cross ventilation and a fan. If it gets hot and humid we have air conditioning of course but it wasn’t that hot in the van. 

Vinegar anyone? 

Sleeping dog aboard. He’s older now and he takes advantage of time to nap. He’s slow to get up and he doesn’t take crazy walks anymore. He’s a little active but if we have a longer walk in the sun we tend to leave him behind to nap. It’s the reality of the passage of time. For me too. 

The original olive trees are still growing here from 1889. Years when Chile and Argentina were both pushing for durian immigrants to come and cultivate these remote lands. 

Back to our hotel camping. 

Road works in a state of stasis.

Note the flagger, pretty stiff armed. I saw the comment about some road work happening and indeed I took the photo because I couldn’t believe it. But unfortunately most improvements are stalled. 

Home sweet home. 

Maipu

We have been a few days circling the wine capital of Argentina and I have to say we got a slow start. Mendoza is synonymous with wine production in Argentina and it’s a big city, the country’s fourth largest, with 120,000 in the city and another 900,000 in the metropolitan area around it. 

The climate here is different and we have debates coming to Mendoza because in the height of summer, in February it was over 100 degrees which seemed a bit much for us as we enjoyed those comfortable temperatures near 70 in Patagonia. 

There are some insects here, and some of them bite. It’s still warm by day, in the mid 80s but it takes a while to cool off at night. It’s not the desert around here even though the countryside further out from the city certainly is. 

We arrived here in Maipu on the outskirts of the big city and found  camping in a hotel, Posada de Cavieres,  and its vineyard. We take hot showers in the main building have electricity to plug into but only at night when the outside lights come on, and pay $20 a night for a quiet spot in the countryside. 

We like this arrangement so we decided we would make it a base from which to do some exploring. But we also had a job to do and it did not go well. We have had one drawer that stopped running properly in and out when we were in Central America.  We tried to get it fixed in Colombia but the carpenter said the space wasn’t square and it wasn’t going to slide properly. 

Layne got a tip on the internet from an overlander saying this guy could fix it. He took two days to half fix it. It became one of those situations where you aren’t sure if the cure is sure than the disease, but once you are half way in you feel like you can’t stop. We spent two nights camping on a river overlook near his home and around 10 pm on the second night we took the half sliding drawer, gave him a hundred bucks and staggered away to lick our wounds. It was bad judgement on our part and good salesman ship on his but he isn’t a carpenter. 

The spot we chose to camp for two nights was actually quite lovely. It was off the secondary road to Mendoza from the village of Poterillos which sits upstream of a dam that has created a large artificial lake in the desert, reminders of Lake Powell. 

Traffic dies away at night and with the almost full moon in the early hours of the morning it was quite lovely. That it only offered us a trash dumpster (mostly full of r out wine bottles) was not a problem while we tired to sort out our sticky drawer. 

Below you can see the white tunnel to Potrerillos and at night it shone like a white beacon. Luckily this section of highway was built before President Milei stopped all public works. 

This overlook commemorates the first attempt at a hydro electric damn here built in 1910 and destroyed by heavy rainfall in 1913. 

There is oil exploration underway in this area which is surprising as we’ve seen drilling across Patagonia. But with all this mineral wealth Argentina constantly teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. 

Beautiful sunny desert mornings, and much cooler than the valley this Mendoza River flows to. 

This is a popular tourist destination especially in summer when school’s out (January and February) and on weekends when Argentines grab bundles of wood and sit out in the countryside grilling meat and drinking maté.

These roadside piles of smoke blackened rock are where families come to picnic. Anywhere a car can pull over you’ll see fire rings as it’s a national obsession. I took these not very crisp pictures early in the morning ing in our way to the carpenter but you get the idea. 

The road up the canyon to the lake was quite scenic, 20 minutes of bliss before we struggled with carpentry. Personally I’d rather focus on this than the bodge job. 

These curves she clusters of houses reminded me of back road central Italy, especially with the spandex cyclists. 

The modern dam. 

A smudge on the windshield. It’s so dusty and dirty here i can’t keep the windshield clean. Drives me nuts. 

Let us draw a veil over the struggle of the drawer. 

Up next. Food and drink. Cheese oil and a Michelin star anybody? 

This is how this page gets written. One finger at a time in Maipu Argentina.