Day 23 - Uco Valley Wine Region

Day 23. Saturday, December 13. Surprisingly, we do wake up in the mood for a day full of wine. Ricky Ricardo picks us up and we head out to the Valle de Uco region. Looking out over the Uco Valley is this South Park Jesus statue.
Our first stop is at the Salentein Winery. The architecture of this building is amazing. The interior is the epitome of awesome:
It's very dark and medieval looking down here, and yet very tranquil at the same time.
Our Salentein tour guide is a nice guy and once we get to the tasting room we know how to get the wine out of them by now. At one point, Todd notices that if he gets a head full of
one of the varieties and then goes straight to another without cleansing, the second one smells exactly like cat piss. This cracks up our guide when he tries the same thing and realizes it is true. We end up in this room drinking for a while. When we get to the main front building again we meet Ricky and he takes us to the art museum portion of the winery. The owner of this vineyard believes that winemaking is an art. So, he believes in creating that atmosphere by having a local artist museum built in right there. But we had spent so much time in the room of wine gluttony that we’ve got to cut the museum portion short. We sincerely enjoy every single aspect of this winery and the tour. We absolutely loved all of the wines. (Except the cat piss, of course.)
The next stop is Andeluna winery, owned by Ward Lay of Frito-Lay Company. The name Andeluna, was chosen “to symbolize the romance and heritage of the Argentine moon illuminating the magnificent Andes Mountains that frame the Uco Valley”. Here we meet up for our first shared wine tour with the know-it-all clan. Two obnoxious ladies, one of whom is the personal wine tour guide of the other, are interrupting our Andeluna tour guide. Admittedly, between the two of them trying to outshine the other in winemaking knowledge, we were hearing quite a few things that we hadn’t learned from any of the other wineries. When we make it to the tasting area we start talking with a gentleman who was also on our tour. We thought he was with the other 2 ladies but he wasn’t. He was a married father from the states in town to climb Mt. Aconcagua the following day. By the way, the wine here has won several awards and yet is not among our favorites.



We didn’t expect that anything could come close to the wonderful lunch we had 2 days ago at Ruca Malen. Well, we were in for a pleasant surprise. We ended up at Altus Winery for our midday meal. We can’t say that it was better or worse than the other, it was a different dining experience. We were given multiple appetizers made from only things grown and processed on their land; grape leaf wrapped goat cheese along with pickled turnips start out the afternoon of seemingly endless tapas (appetizers) and the wine glasses were never empty. This is one of our last hours in South America. It is our last winery and we take our picture with Ricky Ricardo in the vineyard.
We consider ourselves fortunate to have been under his guidance for this adventure. We both learned a great deal about wines and grapes during our stay in this province. Our van takes Ricky home first and then the driver takes us to the airport. As we leave the van for our last seconds of South American Air it is 85 degrees. We pay the exit fee to leave the country, check our bags and, after about 1 ½ hour wait, we board the plane for Santiago which flies over the Andes. The flight is fairly short as Mendoza is basically just across the mountains from Santiago. In fact, with the time zone difference, we land 5 minutes earlier than we took off. The layover in Santiago is a couple of hours. Everything is uneventful, and then we are compressed into our metal tube for the return. The food... well let's not talk about that. The movie is Wall-E. It's hard to enjoy because we had one screen directly to the left of us and another 30 feet down the aisle. Denise watches and likes it while Todd falls asleep half way through.