December 6
Michael started day two of Patagonia wine country super optimistic. I was less so. But we packed up the car, checked out of our AirBNB and headed another hour out of the city to see what we could see. First stop was Bodega del Fin del Mundo – that translates to “end of the world winery”! We popped in, unannounced, and had a great, quick tasting. The wines were delicious and it was easy to communicate (albeit in Spanish). They also had an entire line of wines that were motorcycle themed a la Motorcycle Diaries. Plus they had one of the few Christmas trees we’ve seen so far this season:
After this winery, we headed a few miles down the road to Bodega Familia Schroeder for lunch. Here we found the dinosaurs!
Apparently when the Schroeder family started digging on their land to build the winery, they found dinosaur bones. The real bones have gone to a museum, but they put a small museum down in the basement showing the size of the bones and depicting where they were found. This is why they have an entire line of wines named “Saurus”.
After eating lunch with the dinos, we headed over to our last winery for the day, NQN. We struggled getting into this one all day. We actually went here first, and they were serving lunch (it was 12:30) but said they couldn’t do a tasting until 1pm. So we popped over to the other wineries first. We got back to NQN around 3:30 and they told us again they couldn’t do a tasting. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but they were still serving food, so we had dessert and a glass of wine – figuring that gets the job done for this winery. After we asked for the bill, the manager told us that we now could do a tasting. Too much language barrier to figure out what the situation was, but he passed us off to a woman who gave us a tour of the bodega and talked through the wines.
We had been a little confused about the entire winery all day. We had heard so many things about NQN, but that name was nowhere to be found in the winery. It turns out that a few years ago, Fin Del Mundo bought NQN and has been rebranding it as Malma. This explains two things: the name of the restaurant/wine and why Fin Del Mundo was pushing so aggressively for us to have lunch at Malma instead of Schroeder. I pressed the woman to see if the acquisition was welcome and it seems like it definitely was not. She stated there is still a strong competition between the two lines and there is no collaboration. She did still seem very proud of the NQN wine and also of the rebranded wine. The word Malta means “to be proud” in the Mapudungun language of the native Mapuche people. She also spent a lot of time explaining the symbolism on the wine labels.
After this, we drove the long trek back to Bariloche and had the good fortunate to see this along the route. Note the street light or the bushes to understand the size.
This ends our tour of Patagonia. Michael and I are on a 20 hour bus ride right now and after a layover in Santiago and a few flights, we’ll be in Cusco, Peru for the next adventure: Machu Picchu!