The next day, I rented a car in the hopes of making a 3pm tasting appointment about 40 minutes outside of town. Now, driving in Mendoza funny. Funny strange, not funny ha-ha. Maybe funny isn’t the right word. Maybe something more like maddening, confusing, mildly dangerous, or fast-n-loose. Sometimes there are signs pointing you to where you want to go, sometimes not. There are lines on the road delineating lanes, but they don’t seem to be used much. There are a lot of intersections, but very few have lights or stop signs. What you do when you come to an intersection is tap on your brakes ever so slightly to slow your speed a an mph or two, stretch your neck out to try and see if anyone is coming, then blow through the intersection. It’s harrowing, actually. Turn signals? Rarely. It’s all this continuum of drift. The kicker is that the maps I got from the tourist information office weren’t accurate. The map clearly would show where I could get on the freeway, but then I’d get on that street and it would be one way going in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go. I went around and around like this, circumventing where the map showed the entrance to Route 40, then being spat back somewhere in the opposite direction. I tried to take what looked like the long route to get to another entrance to the freeway, only to get completely lost in some desolate suburb. A couple of times, you could hear me muttering curses under my breath and I think once, I actually shouted, “WHERE AM I?” in tense frustration. I did all this for about 1.5 hours. I missed my appointment at Trapiche winery and instead, flustered and angry, found my way back to the hostel.
The tasting day wasn’t ruined however. That evening, I went to a local tasting room called The Vines, which was only a 15 minute walk from my hostel. The Vines is well regarded for serving flights from the top wineries in the Mendoza areas, so I knew this would be a great place to get a great sampling of various wines all in one convenient place. Since it was relatively early – too early to have dinner yet – I went to The Vines on an empty stomach thinking that the pours, of course, would be one or two ounces. I ordered the Uco Valley Reserve flight. The attendant’s first pour, a Monteviejo Blend 2006 (syrah, malbec, merlot) was actually pretty large – maybe more like four ounces. I thought that she might have slipped, but as I tasted and wrote tasting nots in my notebook, she poured my second wine – also a healthy four ounces. So while I trust my tasting notes are accurate, I look back at them and laugh. By my fifth taste, the handwriting in my notebook – which started out so legible and neat – became kind of loopy and sloppy, drifting outside the lines. And then she poured me an extra taste of a rose, which was lovely with strawberry, vanilla, and some lovely tartness, was just some scribbles in my notebook. Yes, there was one point in the tasting that I thought, “I should start spitting,” but the answer in my head to that was, “No spitting on a $250 peso flight, no way. For that kind of money, I’m drinking every drop of this wine.” I awoke dehydrated and with a throbbing headache. I realized I actually didn’t eat any dinner when I get back from The Vines, either. Oops.
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