The Latin Latitudes: Mendoza: Trout and Wine

Mendoza is a stunning city in the heart of Argentinian wine country. The city is green, friendly and clean. They love their wine and have daily bicycle and bus excursions to the local wineries. They even have a wine coloured fountain. Time to get involved!

The first night we decided it was time to catch up on our red meat intake. Until now we had not had good beef (or any other red, white or pink meat) while in South America. So we headed to a recommended restaurant around the corner from the hostel and ordered a steak. And was it a steak - it was HUGE, juicy and probably the best tasting meal we had had for months. Needless to say we slept well that night!

We hired a tandem bicycle and without too much arguing managed to navigate the beautiful city of Mendoza up to the stunning (and huge park) for a picnic. We then looked in on the variety of parks and plazas around the city, watched Tango in one and drank local wine in another.

We decided to skip the wineries of nearby Maipu and head out to the Vallei de Uco where we had been promised the best wineries of the region, a great camping spot at the easy-to-get-to Historico de Manzana (The Historic Apple Tree) and plenty of bicycles to hire with which we planned on visiting above mentioned wineries.

It was not entirely so! To summarise the few days in this stunning area: Our bus stopped 50km short of Historica Manzana (the ticket lady sold us a ticket on the wrong bus), there were no bicycles there either, this resulted in us hiring a taxi to take us the final 50km to Manzana. We did have a magnificent lunch at a small boutique winery and got to taste the owners personal, not yet bottled wine, (which was delicious) and enjoyed the vistas of the snowed capped Andes.

We thought that things were changing. Not so! When we got Historica Manzana we did find beautiful campsite that we had all to ourselves but there where still no bicycles, taxis or any other form of transport (hirable or stealable) for us to get to the wineries which turned to not be nearly within walking distance of the hamlet of Historico Manzana.

We did find a trout stream and decided that we should spoil ourselves with fresh trout and local vino. So while we missed the wineries we cannot say we were totally let disappointed.