I may have solved the problem of the length of the video previously posted. When you click on the link below, it should play (It plays on Windows. I don’t know about you Apple users).
This video is quite a bit smaller than the previous video (less than 1 mb, compared to 30mb), but regrettably, of poorer quality. Still, you can get a good 16-second sense of the evening. Enjoy!
Ah, Uruguay. I want to go back.
We took the high-speed Buquebus ferry from Buenos Aires to Colonia del Sacramento on New Years Eve day, a one-hour ride across the Rio de la Plata in the morning, another hour back to Buenos Aires before dinner that evening. A good day-trip. Colonia del Sacramento is a World Heritage city, the oldest in Uruguay, originally founded in 1680 by the Portuguese. The original street plan and many of the old buildings still stand in the historic district.
We were expecting an historic, yet lively and slightly exotic, city something like Cartagena, Colombia.
We underestimated the effects of Colonia’s much smaller size (population of about 20,000 compared to Cartagena’s 900,000), the fact that a holiday started that evening, and perhaps also the magical peace of Uruguay’s culture.
Dogs slept in the streets, opening only a moderately interested eye when a car passed by every ten minutes or so. Cats preened on the tops of cars and in open windows.
The historic district was even quieter than the rest of the town. All the museums were closed for the holiday. The few tourists dutifully checked out the few tourist shops that were open and looked at the historic buildings, notably an old lighthouse whose top offered lovely views over the old town.
Otherwise the tourists sought a shady spot against the heat of the day. What else was there to do? Those dogs and cats had the right attitude!
The streets in the newer part of town were shadier and also livelier. (I confess here that the boundary between the newer town and the historic district, where the old city wall no longer existed, wasn’t always clear, and some or even most of these pictures may technically be in the historic district, though not the oldest part of it.)
We spent a pleasant half hour or so in a clothing store that featured unusual items, all made in Uruguay, chatting with the shop owner. There were no other customers. There was no hurry, plenty of time to enjoy the company.
There was plenty of time, too, to sit in the grass under a tree by the edge of the broad river and read a book. Until the wind picked up and like other tourists we sought the shelter of a sidewalk cafe, perhaps one shaded by bougainvilleas as big as trees.
Somewhere during the course of this magical day, the mind slows down and the heart grows deeper and consciousness takes a slow curving turn at right angles to all other states of mind ever experienced up to this point. Life is better than good, here in Uruguay. Every slow moment is delicious. A week here would be world without end. We have to come back.
Florida Street (or Calle Florida in Spanish) is one of Buenos Aires’s famous tourist attractions. Okay, so… we’re tourists, aren’t we? And the malls in Recoleta, where we’re staying, are just ever so chi-chi and correct. And full of chain stores a lot like those we have back home. We’d like to see some shopping that’s a little more colorful and local.
Calle Florida is certainly colorful. And busy, with street vendors selling their wares on both sides of the street as well as up and down its middle, for block after block after block.
What we hadn’t expected–though if we’d read more about the street’s long history as a pedestrian shopping street, we should have known–is that Calle Florida is also lined with beautiful old shopping galleries.
We also found some attractive and interesting street details.
Finally, ending on a gargoylish theme, this one is from the door of the university administration building just a few blocks away from Calle Florida.
There’s a lot to be said for the Palermo Soho neighborhood of Buenos Aires. And believe me, I will say it. 🙂 But first, let me mention that Dan and I were staying in the fashionable, high-brow Recoleta district at the incomparable Palacio Duhau – Park Hyatt Hotel, an establishment whose prices would have been well beyond our budget without a little help from American Express points earned by the sweat of Dan’s brow. Or, well, by the extent of his business travel. Recoleta is lovely in a sort of Beacon Hill way. Lovely and ever so proper. We liked it. We were eager to see someplace else.
Soho beckoned.
We went there to see the boutiques and restaurants. Which were nice enough. But we fell in love with the street art. There was such an air of freedom and exuberance about the place! (Lots of pictures later in this post.)
First, the streets themselves were attractive: brightly colored buildings set along tree-shaded avenues and colorful alleys. Here’s one such alley.
The shops and restaurant interiors also did not disappoint. From street cafes to formal restaurants to shops, they were lovely inside.
But the real treat of visiting Palermo Soho was the street art. Many of the shop and building owners decorated their exteriors with wonderfully painted storefronts that ranged from the interesting to the positively exuberant. I can’t resist street art. Here’s a sampling. (There are a lot of pictures in this section. I like them all so much, it’s hard to choose!)
I’ve been saving the very best one for last: Noah taken hostage aboard the ark!
Next: Calle Florida, Buenos Aires’s pedestrian shopping street.
Dan assures me that in some ways Bodega Sottano was the most interesting of the four vineyards we visited. I missed many of the points our guide made, as I was struggling to keep the contents of my stomach where they belonged (see lunch, previous post). So here are Dan’s observations about Bodega Sottano.
This winery, it seems to me (Dan says), shows a great deal about how the wine industry has been able to grow so quickly in Mendoza. The winery is a first venture for the sons of a family with Mendoza winemaking roots. It’s relatively new, founded (I think) in 2003. Rather than investing a lot of money in building or landscaping, which are both fairly minimal, the founders have invested heavily in production capacity, using the most modern technology.
Aiming to make high-quality wines in the mid- to high-price range, Bodega Sottano is growing carefully. They currently use perhaps only a tenth of their winemaking capacity and rent the rest of their capacity out to others. This strategy has the dual benefit of allowing them to pay for the equipment that they ultimately want to be able to use, while at the same time allowing other start-up winemakers to make wines without any heavy initial investment in production equipment.
It’s a great win-win arrangement (Dan says) that shows how Mendoza could have moved from maybe fifty to maybe over a thousand wineries in just ten years, becoming one of the world’s top winemaking regions.
Our third stop on the winery tour of the Lujan de Cuyo is Bodega Melipal.
It’s the high point of the day in more ways than one. The first way, we’ve been expecting. More than expecting–looking forward to. We’ve been drinking wine all morning. We’re hungry, and behold! It’s lunchtime!
The lunch is beautifully presented, and each course is accompanied by a delicious wine pairing. The dessert and its accompanying dessert wine are a fine finishing touch.
There was a problem with the lunch for me, and perhaps me alone. The lone vegetarian in the group, I was given a main course of roasted or sauteed vegetables. It was beautiful to look at, and tasty, too.
But between the cheese it was covered with (and I with a degree of lactose intolerance and no lactase with me) and the oil (perhaps olive oil) it was swimming in, I ended up with a terribly upset stomach that stayed with me for the rest of the day.When I could barely even sip a taste of wine at our next vineyard, I knew the situation was bad.
I don’t blame Melipal for this. The place, the service, and the wine were all excellent. Just my poor luck.
The other delightful surprise about Melipal was the landscaping. This was far and away the most beautiful of the vineyards we visited–perhaps anywhere, ever.
After lunch, we move on to Bodega Sottano in the next post.
Our tour of four representative wineries of the Lujan de Cuyo region of Mendoza continued at Kaiken Winery. Here we were treated to a walk in the fields to learn about the cultivation of the grapes.
Some of these vineyards contained vines seventy to a hundred years old; others were fairly recently planted.
Hail is a major hazard–in an area where climate is moderate, rainfall light, and irrigation pervasive, there are few hazards of grape growing; and vintages are consistent, year after year. The single major hazard is hail, which can fall hard and heavy, with hailstones as large as baseballs. Hail can ruin a crop in minutes. And so netting to protect the vines from hail, though expensive, is increasingly being used.
These vines are watered using water-saving drip irrigation. We also saw areas where the vines were irrigated in the traditional way through the use of irrigation ditches (acequias). The vines here had much heavier stems–they might have been older–but less abundant foliage. I don’t know how the grape production compares.
Everywhere, the early-summer grapes were beautiful.
In addition to tasting a number of Kaiken’s excellent wines, we were also given a taste of the wine still fermenting in the tank. It wasn’t grape juice any more; it was really wine! And–it was also excellent.
Next post: Bodegas Melipal and Sottano
We booked an in-depth tour of four vineyards through the excellent and friendly Ampora Wine Tours in Mendoza. The tour was an all-day affair that visited four vineyards. It included a luncheon with wine pairings at one of them.
The first winery, and in some ways the most interesting, was at the historic Bodega Benegas. The history of this vineyard, as remembered through the haze of a day of drinking excellent Argentine wines, is that the owner is the scion of a family of venerable Argentinian winemakers. His grandfather (or great-grandfather?) was Tiburcio Benegas, the founder of Trapiche Vineyards, who introduced French vines into Argentina over a hundred years ago. The owner of the current Benegas practically grew up in the Trapiche winery, but by then the family had sold the winery, and the young man went off to make his fortune in some other field–investment banking?–in Buenos Aires. But wine was in his bloodstream, and Mendoza called. And his fortune must have been in pretty good condition, too, for he was able to buy and completely (and beautifully) renovate the run-down hundred-year-old winery and vineyards that now comprise Benegas Winery. He makes some nine different wines (named after his many children) in the beautifully renovated old buildings. And good wines they are!
The entryway to the winery sets a tone of intimate elegance, with small plantings of grapes, along with other greenery, flanking the path.
Inside, the first building contains exhibits of old winemaking equipment and some lovely traditional wall hangings.
Much of the wine is fermented for up to eighteen months in French oak barrels.
It is blended with other wine made in larger tanks; and then the finished wine stored in the bottle for a year, in the old concrete fermentation cellars, an area of the winery that vaguely reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “A Cask of Amontillado.”
Unaware of the dark, ancient cellars with their suggested mysteries, kittens played in the sunlit gardens above.
Next: Kaiken Winery
The city of Mendoza has grown around an historic center that is organized in a square, eight blocks by eight blocks, with a two-block-by-two-block park, the Plaza Indepencia, at its center.
Plaza Indepencia
One block in from each of the larger square’s corners is a smaller one-block-square park. Here is one of them, Plaza San Martin, with its bold statue of Argentine hero General Jose de San Martin at its center.
Plaza San Martin
This small a scale makes the entire historic center completely walkable; and of course, urban-planning enthusiasts that we are, this means that Dan and I compulsively block by block have to walk it.
One of the most striking features of the city is its lush greenery–this, in what is essentially an arid, desert climate. Trees, mostly plane trees, line both sides of every street, making even ordinary blocks seem elegant and inviting.
The secret to all this greenery lies in a system of irrigation originally pioneered by the original Huarpe inhabitants. A system of acequias (pronounced “ah-SAY-kee-ah”) lines both sides of every street. Acequias are irrigation ditches (it sounds much better in Spanish!) that bring water flowing from Andean snow melt throughout the city, controlled by gates (somewhere) that allow the flow now into one acequia, now into another. The trees are planted beside the acequias, where their roots receive all the water they need.
Acequia
Dividing the historic district west-to-east is the commercial Av. Sarmiento; the three blocks east of Plaza Indepencia comprise a wide, delightful, and crowded pedestrian mall.
Av. Sarmiento
No description of Mendoza would be complete without mention of its many restaurants. We especially enjoyed meals at the intimate and friendly Ocho Cepas (Eight Varietals… of wine grapes, naturally) and especially at the excellent Azafran, which instead of a wine list invites you *into its wine cellar* (not technically a cellar, but a climate-controlled room) where the sommelier helps select a very reasonably priced bottle of wine for your particular taste and meal. Like many restaurants in Mendoza, Azafran has a great outdoor dining area, but we especially liked the interior, where regional olive oils, spices, and other products decorate the walls–and you can buy them!
Azafran Restaurant
We approached Mendoza from the east, and so the landscape that stretched out under our wings was not the jagged terrain of the Andes but rather the lush, fertile valley of vineyard after vineyard.
And so, our first introduction to the vineyards of Mendoza was from above. But it was not our last. Stay tuned for more photographs from ground level!
