Mendoza: The Land of Vino

While we were in Mendoza with the express purpose of drinking wine, it also must be noted that it's a lovely city too. It's hot, but all the streets are lined with huge trees, giving you pleasant shade to walk in. There's five central plazas all will different statues or fountains and a nice pedestrian road full of restaurants and cafes. There's vineyards surrounding Mendoza for miles in all directions but the easiest to get to are in the neighboring town of Maipu, a short city bus ride away. There from a number of competing businesses, you can rent bikes, because the best way to get from vineyard to vineyard for a full day of drinking, or as the sophisticated call it "tasting," wine is careening around on a rickety bike navigating via provided free map that has no concept of scale or street names, right? Right.

Starting out strong 

Armed with our rudimentary map, we set out and managed to navigate to our first stop, a wine bar clearly marked with a gigantic purple bottle out front. There we pretended to know what we were supposed to be tasting and tried five different local wines before being gifted a full bottle of wine at the end. What a great start! From there we biked to a couple of really swanky vineyards, nice enough for us to sufficiently feel like we were in The Parent Trap, and acquired even more wine on each stop. By the end of the day both our bellies and backpacks were full of wine and we only had managed to stop at four places out of about twenty listed on our map. You could easily spend several days biking around trying them all.

After we returned our bikes, we hurried back into the city to catch one last overnight bus! This time we were heading for the outskirts of Buenos Aires to do a little bit of farming in the countryside. The second to last stop is coming up next in Cañuelas!