Mendoza Winery Tour

I’m in Mendoza. It’s the winery capital of Argentina, so how could I come here and not go on a Mendoza winery tour? (That was a rhetorical question. Please don’t feel the need to answer it.)

It was billed as a winery tour, but it was a tour of two wineries, one olive grove and factory, and one vineyard and winery.

All four stops were clustered, with none more than 15 or 20 minutes from the previous stop. I didn’t time it, but I don’t think the first stop was much more than half an hour after the last of the hotel pickups the tour bus made in the city.

After the bus finished picking up the last of the passengers (about two dozen people), the tour guide got on her microphone and asked the passengers how many people needed the tour in Spanish and how many needed English.

Regular readers will know that while in Córdoba I took two tours, a Córdoba city tour and a Sierras valley tour where I was the only English speaker. The guide on both, alternated between Spanish and English, turning to me and addressing me individually when they switched to English.

That wasn’t the case on today’s Mendoza winery tour. Three or four people raised their hands for Spanish, and about 20 for English.

However, the predominance of English is less because that was the passengers’ mother tongue and more because English is the lingua franca of travel.

The guide on the bus asked only a couple in the front row where they were from: Switzerland.

I don’t know why she only asked them, but other nationalities revealed themselves anon.

At all four stops, we were split into separate English and Spanish groups. Two guides from the establishment we were stopped at led separate unilingual tours. At two of the four stops, the guide who led the English tour asked where everyone was from. I think I’m forgetting one or two nationalities, but Canada (just me), the United States (one woman), Britain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Serbia, and as mentioned above, Switzerland were all represented.

The guide on the bus spoke on the way to the first stop, between stops, and on the way back into the city.

She had a microphone. The bus’s speaker system was not great. It sounded like she was talking through an amplified tin can. Some of the problem might have been how close she held the mic to her mouth. I often worried that it might be a choking hazard, particularly because she stood up facing the passengers while the bus was moving.

Between the poor sound and her heavy Spanish accent, I think it’d be generous to claim I caught much more than 50 percent of what she said.

From what I did hear, she spoke about the climate and geography of the Mendoza area. I couldn’t make out whether she said that the Mendoza area averages 313 or 330 days of sunshine a year. But it also gets some horrific weather, including high winds that close everything down and, on those rare occasions when they do get precipitation, they can get hail, sometimes as large as tennis balls.

The nearby, high Andes mountains also affect the climate, but I didn’t quite catch what.

In addition to talking about the climate and geography, before each stop, she spoke a little bit about the establishment we were about to visit and what we would be tasting there.

Oh, another thing I heard and remember her saying was that Argentina has 1,200 wineries. That sounds like a lot of wine.

Also, she said that all of the wineries, and the olive farm, we visited today are boutique, independently owned establishments.

It’s getting late and I have an early start tomorrow, so let’s get right into it so I can get a few hours sleep.

Mendoza Winery #1: Familia Cecchin

Our first stop was an organic winery, Familia Cecchin, The guide there took us a little way into the vineyard and told us about the grapes they grow and their growing and harvesting processes.

They harvest some of their grapes by machine and some by hand. The machine shakes the fruit off the vine, so it gets only the grapes. When grapes are harvested manually, the workers take whole clusters, and the stems then have to be separated as part of the winemaking process.

Being an organic winery, they don’t use herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers other than compost, including composting of the stems separated from the manually harvested grapes.

Parrots can be a big problem for a Mendoza winery. According to the guide, there are a lot of parrots there, and they like to eat fruit. It’s legal for Mendoza grape growers to poison the parrots. But Familia Cecchin is an organic grower. As such, they can’t use poison because it will get into their soil. Instead, they grow a lot of fruit trees in their vineyards. The parrots stay in the fruit trees and feast on that fruit, leaving the grapes alone.

Familia Cecchin fights diseases by planting some herbs that kill them and they deal with aphids by buying and distributing ladybugs in the orchard.

With the talk in the vineyard over, the guide took us into the winery and described their winemaking process. (None of the processes were running today because it’s a national holiday.) She also told us that the founders of the winery, the Cecchin family, have an Italian heritage.

Something I do remember about the process is that, for the wines that are aged in oak, they use mostly American and Canadian oak barrels, but also some French. I think it might be just a coincidence, but those are also the countries they export their wines to.

Then it was on to the tasting. We tasted four different wines.

The first was a white wine, but it was called an orange wine. It has nothing to do with oranges. There are no oranges or parts of oranges added. And because it’s an organic winery, it obviously has no orange dyes. Instead, the particular process used for that wine gives it a slight orange hue. I forget why.

The next two wines were reds. And the fourth was a nice sparkling wine that had a bit more of a bite than most Proseccos and Champagnes I’ve had.

I don’t have a sophisticated palate so don’t expect me to tell you about what hints of what flowers, herbs, fruits and/or spices each wine had. But I enjoyed them all.

Mendoza Winery #2: Don Manuel Villfañe

The next Mendoza winery we stopped at was not an organic one, but it was particularly special. The entrance to the winery building is on a wooden bridge over a small pond. In the pond, there were fish. Just yesterday, I was lamenting the temporary closure of the Municipal Aquarium in Mendoza and feeling very guilty about not being able to post any pictures of fish on this trip. And now, here’s a Mendoza winery with fish swimming around. And I have a picture to prove it.

After admiring the fish, the guide at Don Manuel Villfañe took us a little way into their vineyard and told us a bit about their grapes and viticulture. She said that they get only 30 days of rain a year. (So maybe it was 330, not 313 average days of sunshine.) As a result of the dryness, their grapes don’t grow very large, only to about the size of blueberries. This concentrates the flavours and the sugars, the latter of which becomes alcohol in the fermentation process.

By the way, Mendoza is classified as a desert. They, and all of the wineries around Mendoza, depend on irrigation, which comes from snow melt off the mountains.

Like at Familia Cecchin, we then went into the winery where we were told about their winemaking processes and then had a tasting. Here, we tasted three wines, one white and two reds. Again, I enjoyed them all.

Mendoza Olive Farm: Centenario

Our next stop was not at a Mendoza winery, but rather at a family-owned Mendoza olive grove and processor, Centenario. Here we went into the grove and the guide told us about the varieties of the olives they grow, the ages of their trees, and the harvesting process.

Centenario grows olives both for pressing into olive oil, which they do there, and for processing into edible olives.

We also had a tasting there. That tasting consisted of five different types of olive oils (all made by Centenario) poured on small pieces of bread, two types of their olives, olive paste on small pieces of bread, and hummus on small pieces of bread. (Don’t ask me why they provided hummus.) They were all delicious.

Centenario has a small store there (every place we visited did) where they sold their products. And, for 2,000 Argentinian pesos (about $2US), they sold a small cup of ice cream with olive oil blended in for eating there. I was skeptical, but I bought one. It was some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had.

Mendoza Winery (sort of) #3: Esencia 1870

Our last stop wasn’t a Mendoza winery. Now it’s just a vineyard. They send the grapes to an offsite facility to ferment into wine. It used to be a winery and is one of the oldest (the oldest?) wineries in the Mendoza region. The 1870 in the name, Esencia 1870, is the year it was founded.

The vineyard is beautiful. There’s a vintage truck sitting out front that’s still used today during the harvest. Near the old winery building, there’s a long pergola used for holding events by the vineyard.

The old winery building is now a museum, tasting room and store. It was fascinating.

The old fermenting tanks, which are all still in place, were cylinders made of bricks from Britain and cement mortar from France. There’s also iron from Germany inside the tanks.

(I don’t quite understand the function of the iron. At first, I thought it was a sleeve inside the cylinder. However, I asked the guide if the wine fermented against the iron, but she said, “No, cement.”)

The tanks are two stories tall, with the lower part being underground, where it’s cooler.

You might be thinking, “Bricks? Cylinders? How did that work?” The bricks weren’t shaped like normal bricks. They were curved to be joined into a seamless cylinder.

After hearing about the cylinders while standing among them on a floor at the ground level, we walked down a spiral staircase to see their lower half and heard some more about them there.

We then walked through a small door into a cell-like room with another small door on the opposite side of the room. Inside, the guide asked us if we knew what the room was used for. She said a lot of people guess a prison cell, but that’s not it.

Someone guessed that was where they stored the bottles. “No.”

Someone else guessed that’s where they kept their barrels for aging. “No, we didn’t age our wines in barrels.”

When everyone gave up she told us. The doors didn’t used to be there, they were cut in for the tours. The room was used for fermenting wine. She told us to shine our phone flashlights on the ceiling. When we did, the ceiling sparkled. They were crystals that formed there during the fermentation process. Fascinating.

After that, it was back upstairs to the combination tasting room and store. We had already tasted one wine in the tank room, a white wine. In the tasting room, we tried two more wines, both of them reds. Again, I enjoyed all of the wines. I’m probably just not discerning enough.

By the way, I know that ten tastings (four, three, and three) sounds like a lot. But they were only tasting size. As I said, the English split-off-group had about 20 people. The tastings for a wine were usually poured from a single bottle, and there was often a little left after they finished the pour.

And with that, it was back to the city and time for me to end my day.