January 2
Apologies in advance. These next couple of posts may be a bit boring. We hit up 24 wineries in 8 days which is a ridiculous amount of wineries. I mostly want to document which wineries we went to so when someone says, “I’m going to Mendoza, which winery should we visit?”, I can properly recall. So I’ll try to keep it brief and include the most beautiful pictures of wine country. If nothing else, you can scan the pics and ignore the rest. We started with Chilean wine country in Aconcagua valley.
Viña San Esteban – our first visit had a great view of the Andes. A portion of their grapes are grown on a slope that when they went to dig, they found Incan petroglyphs and have since worked with the federal government to protect and preserve the land. Note: petroglyphs are pictures carved into stone. The wines were good, but more than anything else we were just excited to be there. Viña San Esteban is the family name and the name of the winery, but the wine is actually called In Situ – which from the indigenous tongue roughly translates to “in this place” and speaks to their philosophy of ensuring that their wines reflect the character of the Aconcagua Valley.
Viña Errazuriz – This winery was incredibly beautiful and fancy. We were late for our tour, so we were only allowed a tasting, which was a shame. The wines were really good and we all especially loved the Carménère – the native-ish wine that I mentioned in a previous post. This was one of Phil’s top wines for the rest of the trip.
Flaherty Winery – This was a fun one. The guy who gave the tour was a hippy from California where he met the winemaker and then followed the winemaker to Chile in the 90’s. The wines were good, not the most memorable, but the tour was great.
Hippy on the far right and Philip staring into your soul on the far left:
Plus they’re Star Wars fans!
Thank you to a wonderful time, Aconcagua! Off to Argentina tomorrow!