Monday, March 23, 2009

Mendoza take 2

Wine Country: These heavenly words sing vacation in my ears. No matter the country, the region, or specific varietal specialty: I LOVE wine tours. But something i'd never experienced, a bliss altogether new, came from adding the phrase "at harvest time" to those two aforementioned magical words.

Typical visits to wine country include tours with sterile warehouses with idle stainless steel tanks, carefully guarded oak barrels, bottling and packing assembly lines as vacant as a car factory in Michigan, and row after row of likely fruitless vines. Sure you get to walk through the process, and taste the final product, but we're left with missing puzzle pieces, expected to imagine grapes where vines lay dormant, crushing and pressing where machines sit gathering dust, and wine makers carefully mixing blends where labs sit empty. In truth, the winery feels lifeless. Of course the tasting and tour is enjoyable but we still don't quite understand how a sugary fruit becomes a smooth complex wine.

I knew this trip would be different when, en route to our first winery, our driver pointed out a truck full of Cabernet Sauvignon (which he identified by the grape's small size) on its way to be crushed. I fidgeted in my seat all the way to the first winery, positively gleeful at this sign of life in usually quiet pastures.

Each winery treated us to a new revelation, an added puzzle piece. At Septima we saw crates of grapes fresh off the vine being poured into the de-stemmer and crushed. At O'Fournier in the Uco Valley we witnessed a wine maker turning the fermenting juice's cap back into the tank, at Salentein we saw pickers in the field, and at Andeluna bottles were being corked, labeled, and organized for shipping.

But the biggest treat of all was our tour of Tapiz. This boutique but growing winery has been a favorite of mine since I learned the owner chose Magritte's bowler hat man with hat removed to represent his wine as an escape from the business world. We toured the property in a horse-drawn carriage stopping to pick a few ripe Malbec grapes and walked through the active wine making process with a sip for each step. We had the privilege of tasting a Sauvignon Blanc just three days old, still grassy from the field and saccharine and tingly on the tongue as the sugar fermented into alcohol. We tasted another wine post-fermentation but pre-barrel, sensing its raw, hefty flavors, and then witnessed the smooth toasting effects of the barrel on a Chardonnay and Malbec. Finally, we experienced the art of the wine maker's touch after tasting a final aged and bottled blend. This tactile tour was complete with pumps humming the new crop into prepped tans, wine makers examining the year's yield in the lab, and quality controllers checking bottles along the assembly line.

Each visit to Mendoza has been exciting, stimulating, energizing, and thrilling. This time was no different; the warmth of a homecoming blended with the allure of discovering this ever-evolving region anew and alive with growth. This year's harvest will be the largest yet, reaching more countries than years past, (even France put in orders) and at a higher price point. In true Argentinian style, Mendoza seems not to have noticed the world's dry financial taps, and continues celebrating its frenetic Vendimia as it's own taps flow gem-like reds and golden-hued whites.

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