Meet the Parents

My parents recently popped down for a visit, after taking a cruise around Southa America: from Valparaiso, Chile down the Pacific coast, around Cape Horn, and up the Atlantic coast to Buenos Aires. I met them at the port here in BA on Easter Sunday. After settling them into their hotel, Holly and I took them to breakfast at our favorite cafe, then we all went to Easter Mass at a nice church in Recoleta. It was the first time I had been to church here, and it was a nice mass. Argentina is more than three-quarters Roman Catholic, so the church was pretty crowded. I was a bit surprised that the people didn't get more dressed up.

My parents spent two days here, then two days visiting Iguazu Falls on the border of Argentina and Brazil. The remainder of their time here in Buenos Aires, we walked around a lot and Holly and I showed them our favorite parts of the city (which have already been covered in other blog posts).

Then we went to Mendoza. We took an overnight bus ride from Buenos Aires, checked into our hotel, had some lunch, and hired a driver to take us to some bodegas.



After hiring a driver for the day, and taking a tour of a vinyard and wine-making museum, we sampled some of Mendoza's finer wines at a place called Vines of Mendoza. We sampled flights of about ten different wines, about half Malbecs.


Our second day, we visited two more vineyards, Bodega Lopez, and Familia Zuccardi. We had a lovely lunch at Familia Zuccardi, complete with pairings of white wines, red wines, and desert wines.

Big bottles at Bodega Lopez.

Turn on the hoses...
At first this looked like playground gravel, but we then found out that it was a huge pile of dried skins and stems that had been removed from the grapes.

Bodega La Rural

As you may already know, wines from Argentina have become more and more popular in the United States over the past couple years. This is due in part to the devaluation of the peso, and in part due to the fact the wineries in Argentina are investing more and more in themselves and creating better quality wines. We tried many different varietals on our tour through Mendoza, but we all agreed with the universally espoused mantra that the Malbecs are the best.

I am told that wine consumption used to be much higher than it is today, but wine is still fairly popular in restaurants and at the dinner table here. Argentina is the world's fifth largest wine procucer, and consumes about 90% of the wine it makes. Although improving, most of the wine produced today is low-quality table wine. Neither Holly or I are wine snobs, however, so we usually don't have any trouble finding affordable bottles that suit our tastes.