March 6 – Oops Tours and Wine Tours

This morning we went on an “OOPS TOUR.” The tale of our morning adventure is funny and silly. It's all writing, so if you want to skip my tale and go directly to pictures, skip down to WINE TOUR.

OOPS TOUR:

We had arranged a bicycle wine tour for today: get driven to Maipu (an area south of Mendoza), meet our English speaking guide, rent bikes and go. Pickup at 10:00.

10:00 arrived and a car pulled up. The fellow could not speak any English, but seemed happy to see our tour voucher. Off we go. We drive around town (he seemed to have an errand) and then headed south. We started to wonder if something was awry. Optimistically, I guessed he was a private guy hired to take us to our guide. Pessimistically, were we picked up by the wrong guy?

We were well south of Maipu when we convinced him to pull over and call the tour agency. We're not sure who he called. Off we go again, stopping to ask directions a couple of times and ending up at a winery called Chandon. One of the hosts speaks some English and tries to help out. After many phone calls, and much discussion I can't follow (and a nice glass of wine) we drive back to our hostel. It's noon, so all this has happened in 2 hours.

At our hostel we find out the tour agency has been looking for us. I talked to the agency and find out our tour is cancelled. Our driver (Carlos) brought us back because he wanted some money for driving us. I pay him some gas money and he goes.

What to do? Our hostel host books us on an afternoon wine tour they know of and I head downtown to the agency. There I meet our Leo, our 'supposed to be bicycle tour' guide, who in very animated fashion gives his version of events. He arrived at the hostel at 10:10, couldn't find us, and tracked us down when Carlos finally called. Carlos was supposed to leave us at Chandon where we would be picked up and our tour would start from there. As I said Carlos drove us back because he wanted to be paid. Leo gave me a partial refund and swore to chase Carlos down to the ends of the Earth and explain proper business ethics to him.

After Leo stormed out I spoke to Pauline, the lovely, patient, French girl who originally booked us. We figured out Carlos was a private guy who was going to drive some others from our hostel but picked us up by mistake and everything went south from there.

Hint for language challenged travellers: Stay in the hostel / hotel and let drivers come in, talk to the staff, who then get you. Don't wait out on the street where anybody can pick you up!

(BTW, the couple who originally hired Carlos got tired of waiting for him and hired another private guy to drive them around).

WINE TOUR:

We got picked up just after 2 p.m. And raced around the city picking up others on the touyr. There were twenty or so of us and we headed out about 3 p.m. 

 First stop was an olive oil factory. It's not a huge operation, but we were treated to Spanish and English versions of the tour by a very nice girl who worked at the factory, had just finished studying English and was about to embark on a new career as an English teacher.

Here she is.

The basic process is:

1. Crushing the olives including the pips in this machine whose stone wheels are part of the original factory from the early 1900's. The paste is pimped out of the crusher with a screw conveyor.

2. The paste is manually spread onto these screens which are stacked..... (next photo)

... onto the holders you see in this press (the post in the left press).  The stacking takes place by the crusher.  The stack is wheeled to the press.

3. The racks of paste are squeezed to get the water and oil out. You are not allowed to use heat or chemicals in the process for the oil to be of extra virgin quality.

4. The oil / water mixture is sent through several decanting tanks to separate the oil and water.

Nosey engineer that I am, I snuck around and had a look at the pumps for their hydraulic presses.  Beautiful little belt driven pumps!

Then we sampled pure olive oil, various flavoured oils, olive paste and some of the other products they make in the factory (dried tomatoes for example).

Some olives on the hoof.
An enjoyable tour, especially since our guide paid a lot of attention to Laura and me.

Onto our first winery – Vistandes. This is a new, ultra modern winery with 230 hectares of grapes at the winery and north of Mendoza. They sell their wine in Argentina and in the US.

Our host explained the process to the group, first in Spanish and then to Laura and I.

This caught the attention of an Italian girl on the tour. She could speak Spanish, but saw that we gringos were getting such good treatment that she joined our little group and the 3 of us had a very good tour.

Some of the tanks.  Like I said, this was an state of the art modern winery (the tanks are stainless with an innovative water jacket for temperature control - an Italian patent).

Honest, I won't bore you with any more of this.

On to the tasting....

We finished the tour with a tasting – quite big samples of two of their wines. Our host showed us the proper way to view, swirl and taste the wine. BTW, the Mendoza Wine Harvest Festival has been going on this week. Our host has had a huge number of groups through the winery – he doesn't want to see another glass of wine for a while!

Next, and last stop is Florio winery. In complete contrast to Vistandes this winery dates back to the early 1900's and is still using some of the original equipment and old concrete (epoxy lined) tanks. Laura and I got our own guide this time and were once again joined by our Italian friend whose name I forgot.

Old time filter press to remove skins for white wine.

At least they don't use their feet!

 

The old concrete tanks.  White is on the right and red is on the left (or, is it.....)

After the tour we looked at their little museum which showed how life was like for the winery workers 50 or more years ago.  Grape pickers picked the grapes in 25 kg buckets you see in the background.  For each bucket of grapes he received one of the paper tokens you see on the barrel.  At the end of the week he exchanged the tokens for cash.  One token was worth about 50 pesos equivalent today.  Would you pick 25 kg of grapes for 50 pesos (5 dollars)?

Period furniture.  The grey pot on the stand is a pumice pot used to filter water.  It is muddy due to the sediments in the river.

 Florio specializes in sweet wines which aren't our favourite, but some were quite nice. We bought a bottle of their standard Merlot.

That ended our tour. Off we went back into Mendoza. Considering how the first half of the day went things turned out not too bad. Another adventure!

I just polished off ther bottle of Vistades Reserve we bought.  Very nice.  I'll report on the other bottle soon!