December 5
Ok – so no one has really heard of this. We hadn’t, at least, until we did a wine tasting in Buenos Aires. So since we’re here…. we might as well see what it’s all about. We drove 5 hours north of Bariloche (ok we weren’t as “here” as we originally thought we were) to Neuquen, Argentina which is home of the Patagonia Wine Trail. Michael had been trying to contact wineries via email for the past week as reservations are necessary without any luck. So as we headed out of town, I tried calling the wineries. I’m getting better at Spanish after our month here, but I’m still terrible and I’m especially bad on the phone. So I tried calling a few, finally got through to one and could not communicate a single thing with the person on the other line. In all fairness, I think it was a bad number, but still – no communication at all.
As we went in and out of service in middle of nowhere Argentina, I finally tried my next best option: Idania! I sent a note to Idania pleading with her to try to make reservations for us again (#2 – yes I’m keeping count). An hour or so later I had service again and got a response! She had trouble getting through too (whew – it’s not just me) but she was able to secure us a reservation at one place. So we headed off to La Falda. The winery was down an industrial gravel road and when we pulled up to the gate, someone opened it for us and we entered. No signage or people anywhere, so we drove around a bit and finally parked to investigate on foot. Finally a guy popped out of one of the huge wooden doors and welcomed us to the winery museum. Apparently La Falda was founded in 1910 by a German couple and continues to produce wine in some capacity today.
The entire tour was in Spanish and although I’m sure he dumbed it down for us – Michael and I totally nailed it! The place was cool – had a bunch of old stuff and George, the winemaker, was super nice (yes – he introduced himself as George even though his name was actually Jorge).
After seeing old winery stuff, George took us into their banquet room to do some tastings. At this point, his wife also came out to sit with us. She speaks Spanish and French, so no additional language help there for us, but we stumbled through it.
George was excited for us to taste both their normal wines (under the family name, Herzig) and some of his stuff that he makes just for his family and friends – something similar to grappa and something similar to a port. I took the brunt of this tasting since Michael was driving and George kept throwing new stuff at us.
Afterwards, we figured we’d just pop into another winery to see if they’d let us in without a reservation. The answer to that is no. One place just told us to go home and call. The other place told us we couldn’t do tastings, but we could but a bottle – so we did. Bodega Humberto.
After this, we went to our AirBNB feeling a little down that we were largely unsuccessful so far in tastings. Thankfully Idania got us in that one otherwise the day would have been a total bust. We relaxed for a bit before heading out to dinner. Our AirBNB host suggested a great restaurant, but when we got there – it was completely empty, so we kept walking down to one of the breweries she suggested. It ended up being a super long walk and we hadn’t eaten all day, so the hanger was in full force. But the wait was well worth it once we got there.
It was a great scene with a ton of young people hanging out. The food was good and the beers were really good. This picture and the brewery is very similar to the scene we found all over the town center. Neuquen was young with a lot of people sitting out in green space and exercising. It was a very modern town with a lot going on. The outskirts were pretty industrial, but everything in El Centro was very alive and young. Lots of 20 and 30 somethings hanging – and a lot of kids as well. It was a great little town and our walk/dinner was enough to make the day feel like a success.