Wine & Meat & Desert Peaks: Welcome to Mendoza
I spent a few maddening, beautiful, indulgent days in Mendoza, and I’m going to tell you about them, but first, an abstract:
Our characters in this edition include possibly the most irritating American the South American continent has ever seen, the dearly beloved Anne (first featured in our Puerto Natales comedy of errors), a trio of brothers committed to creating a unique culinary experience in Mendoza, a gentle and awkward Argentinian man whose heart may now be broken, and the Greek chorus of our Mendozan adventure, our pivotal sidekicks who carry the story with their collective commentary: wine & meat.
The story will unfold over the course of three days, each getting subsequently more enjoyable for our main character. It will explore a main theme of hardship and/or lack, and the beauty that can arise from it, and also touch on the importance of being a lifelong student.
Scene opens on a hostel on the east side of Mendoza. Morning light filters through a glass-block window and illuminates Kath, who is standing at the kitchen sink in PJs, sleepily sudsing her breakfast dishes. An eager young Latino steps into frame. We can tell he’s eager from every part of his body: his face is defined by its cheek-stretching smile, he’s wearing a video game t-shirt unironically, and he’s standing with feet pointed slightly outwards as if to best anchor him to that very spot. After identifying Kath as American, he offers up, in rapid-fire and incredibly well-accented English, three truths: his name is Guillermo, he’s Paraguayan, and he’s going to spend his day exploring Aconcagua.
At this point, I’ve1 still made no concrete plans for my time in Mendoza and I’m still sleep deprived from my action-packed days in Bariloche, but that name, guttural and vowel-littered, flags something for me. Aconcagua is the name of the mountain, the biggest in South America, that I’d read about the morning before as I waited for my flight to Mendoza to take off. I told Gui that I’d wanted to see it, and he, wonderfully eager, ran off to ask his friends if I could tag along.
He came back with three “of courses” and a “maybe”; the maybe, I soon found out, was from an American guy named Chris who would become my mortal enemy. David the Spaniard and Adrian the Argentinian were happy to have me, and they, along with Guillermo the Paraguayan, made me feel very welcome while Chris sulked, skulked, and overall just brought shame to the United States.
Brief list of irritating things he did over the 10 hours we spent together, driving to and then hiking some of Aconcagua:
- shouting out the Spanish words for things he saw like a kindergartener playing the name game, despite being a 33-year-old bike-path planner (like a city planner, but less interesting—a job weirdly perfect for his white-bread personality). “Caballo!” “Montaña!”
- consistently mispronouncing said words (really not at all trying to pronounce them correctly); montaña came out as “man-tayne-ya”—zero attempt at the tilde
- manspreading across the passenger seat to the point where David couldn’t shift into fifth without jostling Chris’s left knee
- complaining that we weren’t going to do the entire hike to the base camp (which would’ve taken 9-10 hours; we didn’t have the time) and then ceaselessly questioning the validity of our stop on the backend (…a bus Gui had bought a $60 ticket for that he really didn’t want to miss) and forcing poor, sweet Gui to apologize over and over again for having made completely reasonable plans
- passive-aggressively commentating on my presence among their merry band of male misfits: “Oh, so you’re sure you’re not too tired to do the hike?” “Oh, I guess now we have to squeeze three of us into the back, goodbye personal space.” “I want to tell a joke but I don’t know if I can tell it in the company of a lady.”
- hiking ~20 yards ahead of everyone else and then pausing theatrically—foot tapping, arms akimbo—for the rest of us, who were walking at a normal pace, to catch up
- assuming DJ responsibilities the ride home and completely ignoring the two main questions that every DJ must ask his or herself before beginning a set—1) what kind of vibe am I trying to create? and 2) who is my audience and where are they coming from?—in favor of just one question: 1) what exactly does Chris want to hear this very minute? The answer to which, I kid you not even a little bit, was “acoustic Justin Bieber covers.” I was actually grateful when I accidentally rubbed my eye too roughly, dislodging a contact and forcing us to pull over so I could paw around for it, because it stopped the music for a beautiful seven minutes.
I swear, he checked every box on my “is this an American I will be embarrassed to share a country with?” list. He even inspired me to create a few new line items, and for that, we must be grateful.
No, but seriously, we can be grateful for a few hours spent walking in beauty. I think I appreciated the view even more because it was something Chris couldn’t ruin—once we’d gotten to the valley and were sitting by the stream, eating lunch and looking up at the peak, it all felt so small and unimportant.
After a trying day of dust and ham sandwiches, Gui and I decided to treat ourselves to a nice dinner at a parrilla (steakhouse—parrilla is the name for the grill used to cook the meat).
Meat is a big deal in Argentina. Its ample pampas, or plains, are perfect for cattle grazing; its cow-to-person ratio is 1.2:1 (only bested by Uruguay’s whopping 3.4:1 and New Zealand’s 2:1) 2. The gauchos, or cattle drivers (and cattle thieves) of the pampas, are now a famous image in Argentinian culture, though for most of the 19th century the government considered them no better than gypsies and drove them out of their lands. There’s now a whole gaucho tourism industry—gringos sign up to learn to ride horses or slaughter beef—and many parrillas feature gaucho decoration and references.
Argentina (along with neighboring Uruguay) was producing beef for mostly internal consumption until the early 20th century, when the demand for beef was driven high by a need for easily-shippable rations. Argentina invested in formalizing their industry through factories and better roads and ports and grew rich off cattle exports; Perón continued to invest in industrialization and cattle farming (along with the broader agriculture industry) thrived.
Until it didn’t. A military dictatorship (one of many in Argentina’s history, unfortunately, but what would become the most violent and human-rights-violation-committing) ousted Perón, partly because of his government’s mismanagement of Argentina’s high inflation, but still failed to stabilize the economy. 3
Still, even though Argentina has dropped into being the 13th-largest producer of beef and per-capita beef consumption has dropped to ~120 pounds/year from a high of 220 (!)4, meat has major cultural and gastronomic significance. Argentinians really only consider two things to be a proper meal: meat or pasta (a nod to the many Italian immigrants who settled here in the 19th century). Beef is by far the most-eaten meat; the most popular cuts are ojo de bife (ribeye), tira de asado (ribs), and bife de lomo (tenderloin), and common ad-ons include morcilla (blood sausage) or sweetbreads.
Gui ordered a fairly basic mileanesa—a breaded and fried cutlet—and I went all out with a full asado. Our waitress brought me my own mini parrilla featuring a still-steaming array of meat: chorizo, morcilla, ojo de bife, riñones (kidneys), and chinchulínes (intestines). Yay! Intestines!
I ate almost everything (though I couldn’t stomach more than a bite of the kidney, which Gui considered a sign of weakness). Gui headed to the bus station and I ambled back to the hostel, where a combination of no air conditioning + 80 degrees + belly full of meat + the acidic reek of unwashed men in the beds across from mine led to a long night of general unpleasantness.
The sun rose on the second day, which was to bring me two beautiful things: my first experience wine tasting in South America and a reunion with the glorious Anne.
In the early afternoon, after spending the morning on a (eventually fruitless) quest to find breakfast pastries not featuring dulce de leche, I boarded a wine tour bus.
Wine tasting by bus, as you may have imagined, was frequented by some of the same patrons of other tourism-by-bus activities: older couples with point-and-zoom digital cameras and overzealous headwear (did we need a safari hat to tour the vineyard? Not likely). We had a darling quartet of Scottish sexagenarians (they made me promise to visit them in Edinburgh one July for the festival), a less-darling May-December romance situation with a Chilean woman and her Argentinian boytoy, and the cutest little Argentinian woman with these thick-cut glasses that made her eyes appear four times their actual size, which was adorable to see bobbing above a wineglass.
There were also Darcy and Emma, a lovely Australian couple who were living what might be all of our collective dream: using the working visas they’d gotten for the UK to secure short-term jobs in their respective fields (physical therapy & primary school education) in London for 3 months, and then taking 3 months off to travel part of the world, then repeating. I caught them on their South American leg; after Mendoza, we ended up running into each other in Buenos Aires (of all the free walking tours in all the world!) and hanging out more there. They are truly wonderful and it was nice to have allies on the under-50 circuit to swig wine with.
Together, our motley group had a pleasant afternoon being shuttled around to different wineries where we traipsed through the vines, paced through underground aging rooms, and sat around tables of all sorts, holding wine to the light, smelling it, moving it around and smelling it again, swishing it to see the tears, and finally, deliciously, tasting it, rolling it around in our mouths, letting the Malbec strip our tongues of moisture.
Considering I was starting from a wine-knowledge level of about 0.1 (out of 100), the entire day was throughly educational, but one piece of insight, delivered to me at our third winery of the day by Flor, a thin, bespectacled young woman with the sweetest smile and a pageboy haircut that just wouldn’t quit, stuck out.
She was walking us through some of the rows of plants in her family’s vineyard and pointed out the irrigation canal that ran along the side. “The government turns out the water one time a week,” she explained, “and that’s the only time the grapes get watered.”
This shocked me. I paused and dramatically laid a hand on my chest. (Full disclosure, this was several glasses in.) “One time a week?” I had imaged that the grapes, big and globular and bursting with flavor—we’d gotten to sample a bunch along the way—were drenched in water constantly to get them to grow. I was wrong.
Winemakers actually purposefully stress the vines by barely watering them. A vine that’s struggled produces a much better, sweeter, more flavorful grape.
How does that work? Well, as Flor so kindly explained to me, a vine that’s under duress—that’s dehydrated and has to be careful about where it spends the water it does get—focuses its attention on its grapes, because those are its best chances to spread its seeds. The more delicious the grapes, the more animals will come to eat them, and the more likely that the vine’s genetic material will live on. So the vine produces as much sugar as it can, and, not wasting any energy on ancillary leaves or other such nonsense, sends it directly to its grapes to make them as flavorful as possible. It’ll also produce a thicker peel, to better protect its labor-of-love fruit.
Isn’t that amazing? A real, live, naturally-occurring case study on the plus sides of having to struggle: grapes are better and sweeter (and have thicker shells) when they’re been through tough times. That’s something that I have come, through my life experiences at school, work, and in my personal relationships, to deeply appreciate; I didn’t expect to see such a perfect metaphor for that belief and, I think, the human condition in general during my Argentinian wine tasting, but I was thrilled to have found one. Cheers to all of you who know the lack of something—a loved one, resources, ability—and have found a way to become the person you are today despite it.
(Flor’s explanation also reminded me of the tadpoles my sisters and I would find in our backyard every spring. The first couple of times we collected some to keep as pets, they never grew into frogs, and we couldn’t figure out what we were doing wrong. My dad looked into it and turns out that tadpoles need to be stressed before they begin the physical transformation into a frog—nature brings that stress when the pools of water where tadpoles usually live start evaporating as summer comes on, but since we kept our tadpoles in a bowl with plenty of water, they could stay in that state forever. We started siphoning off the water, bit by bit, and voila—they sprouted legs, then arms, and eventually became little green frogs in their own right. Nature is so fucking cool.)
When the van pulled up outside my hostel to drop me off, I ran out and inside and nearly directly into Anne, one of my now-favorite human beings, who had arrived into Mendoza that afternoon.
There’s something absolutely magical about reuniting with friends you’ve met on the road. Your bond becomes elevated—you’ve known them almost exponentially longer than anyone else in your immediate vicinity (I met Anne 3 weeks ago which wildly trumped the 3 hours I’d known the German guy in the bed across from mine, for instance) and that familiarity leads to a sense of belonging, of connection, and of comfort that’s hard to come by in long-term travel.
Anne and I embraced, and I ran to get ready for dinner. I’d booked us reservations at Los Bacanes, a closed-door restaurant on the north end of Mendoza. I’d asked my walking tour guide what his favorite places in the city were, and he rattled off a bunch I couldn’t remember or pronounce; Los Bacanes stood out because 1) it was just the one word, really, and I managed to write it down and 2) the background he gave me about it was fascinating—a restaurant inside a private home, where you had to buzz their front door to get in, and which only seated a few people every night. It seemed like a perfect, unique culinary experience to share with Anne, so I, with the help of our hostel owner, called and made a reservation for the night she was to arrive.
Our taxi dropped us off in front of a nondescript house on a nondescript street—nothing about it screamed “fancy dinner club.” A big man with braids and a wide grin stepped outside to welcome us in even before we could locate the bell we were to ring for admittance. He introduced himself as Santiago, the front of house, and told us us that he figured we’d be confused and had waited at the door to make sure we found the place. That display of thoughtfulness and care was just the beginning of our experience.
White people typically don’t find their way to Los Bacanes, Santiago explained; they were worried we wouldn’t speak enough Spanish to be able to order, so Santiago introduced us to his niece, who he’d asked to stick around that evening and help translate. We ended up being fine with my and Anne’s cobbled-together language skills, but we had a lovely conversation with her about her studies.
Niece-as-translator was just another one of those for Los Bacanes: the restaurant is owned and run by three brothers, and the whole thing’s a family affair. Santiago, with unrivaled warmth and an attention to detail, is the server/host; he explains the always-changing menu, the restaurant’s story, brings fresh-muddled welcome cocktails when you sit down and (if you’re lucky, as we were), end-of-service champagne flutes before you get up again. Pablo is the chef, who sources menu ideas from local markets and offers two appetizers, four mains, and two desserts each day; he cooks with focus and a quiet pride and makes an appearance near the end of the evening to general acclaim, which makes him blush. Roberto is the sommelier, who helped us fall in love with a bottle of 2012 Pure Blood, which was as decadent as it sounds. The restaurant itself is in the house they all share, and they’ve done all their own decorating—the wine bottles are stored in window shutters they renovated, some of the tables are antique desks they picked out, and the art is from their favorite painters.
We tried one of each appetizer—fresh calamari and delicious, piping-hot empanadas—and ordered the same main: the steak. We were in Mendoza, after all, and had just ordered a bottle of the second-most-expensive wine on the menu (Roberto was a good sell). Steak was the only option.
This had to have been one of the best plates I’ve ever eaten.
The meat was incredible—tender, flavorful, with a beautiful crust—and everything it was served with elevated it further. The vegetables were fresh, colorful, and just lightly cooked; they kept a crunch that complemented the meat well. The smashed potatoes, coated in oil and rosemary, were earthy and rich. We ate, smiling, laughing, catching up on each other’s travel stories and upcoming plans and lives in general. Santiago dropped by regularly to check in and to lavish (unearned) compliments on our Spanish; we responded in kind, with heartfelt appreciation for the experience he and his brothers had created.
We were the first ones to sit down for dinner (at 9 p.m., natch) and were still there at 1 a.m., the outlasted by only an Argentinian couple celebrating a birthday. I hadn’t laughed so much in weeks; I’d forgotten how comfortable Anne makes everyone around her and what an engaged listener and rapturous storyteller she is.
We had only ordered one dessert, but Santiago brought us both selections, refusing to let us leave before trying their flan. It was a lovely gesture, but I hate flan—its shiny throw-up appearance, its eggy gelatinous texture—and Anne and I only got a bite or two down before gulping champagne to rid ourselves of the taste. We paid the bill, said our goodbyes and headed back to our hostel.
The next morning, Anne and I gorged ourselves on toast and tea in preparation for a day of biking around the Maipu valley, visiting wineries and doing tastings along the way. We successfully navigated the bus system (and by that I mean one and then two bus drivers yelled as us to get off their buses and we complied, embarrassed by our ignorance, only to find out that we could’ve taken either of them; eventually we teamed up with a lovely lesbian Brazilian couple and a deeply annoying pair of Vancouverians to shoulder our way onto a third) and arrived at the first bike rental spot.
Its proprietor, an ancient woman in a spotted muumuu and draped in kittens, purported to do us a favor, but then charged us 150 pesos for rusty bikes. Anne and I conferred and decided we’d bring our business elsewhere. Our Brazilian and Canadian friends followed suit, so we ended up leading a walk-out across the street to Maipu Bikes, where we paid the same amount but got brand-new bikes, helmets and locks, and promise of a happy hour featuring house-made wine when we returned.
Anne and I climbed on and took off down the road for Domiciano, a vineyard whose logo is a beautiful, modern, monochromatic cutout of a rancher under the stars, a nod to their tradition of only harvesting grapes at night, which ensures that fermentation begins when they want it to, and not in truckbeds under the hot Mendozan sun.
Luciana, our guide, and took us on a private tour of their facilities, vines to storerooms to fermentation tanks, which culminated in not one but two tastings (that is, not 3 but 6 glasses of wine).
Halfway through the second tasting, we challenged Luciana to identify, in a blind taste test, the three wines I was debating between (a Malbec, a Syrah, and a Cabernet Sauvignon); she swirled and sniffed like the pro she was and taught us how to pick out the scents and aftertastes of each.
I decided to send home a few bottles of the Malbec and Syrah—both rich and wonderful and, I hope, perfect for Christmas dinner—and we left Domiciano for La Rural Museo, happy with our first stop and more than slightly buzzed.
We arrived at the museum—where we’d heard they gave out entire bottles of wine after their guided tour—right as it was closing for lunch; we decided to keep heading down the road to Trapiche, where we’d booked in for their 3 p.m. guided tour.
Domiciano was small and intimate and warm; Trapiche was its opposite in every way—huge and impressive with its on-site laboratory and modern aging rooms (our guide, Franco, was proud to tell us that Trapiche is the first winery outside of Germany to use concrete, egg-shaped, pressurized containers to age wine; they’re apparently more eco-friendly than oak barrels and allow the winemakers more control of the flavor).
Trapiche’s turned their original aging rooms into a kind of museum, and it was there, standing in a cavernous front hall, where we tasted two wines, each made from the same grapes with the same sugar content and same weight, but one of which with grapes picked during a new moon and one, grapes picked twelve days later, during a full moon.
I couldn’t believe how different they tasted—the one picked during the full moon was sweeter and fuller than the other. I walked with Franco to the next stop on the tour and peppered him with questions about the science behind it all; his best answer was that water is the single greatest influence on a vine (even more important than sunshine) and that since the moon cycles can affect the flow of water underground, they hypothesize that grapes picked during a full moon are sweeter because they get a little more water. (They’re still figuring it all out, clearly, but how cool is it that they’re doing these experiments?)
We tried at least seven different wines at Trapiche; at this point, Anne and I were very tipsy and very much jonseing for lunch. We’d passed a beautiful restaurant at Trapiche but it looked a little too fancy for our workout-gear outfits so we decided to book it another 3 kilometers down the road to Tempus Alba, where a pair of British sisters we’d befriended told us they had an incredible steak-and-wine-tasting deal.
We biked through the now-falling rain, threw our bikes down, and ran into the tasting room at Tempus Alba only be to told that the kitchen closed in five minutes and they were taking no more lunch orders. Of course!
It was at least pleasantly ironic—we’d sat through half a dozen lessons on how to pair wine with food and were about to sit through another, throughly hungry but with only the wine itself on offer. I think it must be the truest test of a new friendship: can you have a blast together even when you’re both starving and drunk and damp and kind of windburned? If yes, please proceed directly to “you are definitely invited to my wedding.”
Despite our growling bellies, we did learn a great deal about wine, and the role it plays on the Argentinian table. In a micro sense—strong, dry wine, like the Malbec that grows so well in Mendoza, pairs best with a heavy, juicy meat, like steak; the meat replaces the moisture that the wine strips from your mouth and provides a strong flavor of its own so that the wine doesn’t overpower you.
In a macro sense, Argentina’s wine industry developed not because it makes such a handsome pair with its meat industry, but because, after the wine industry experienced a decline during the military dictatorships (people couldn’t afford to buy as much and new, cheaper products [like beer or soft drinks] were more readily available)5, Argentina followed Chile’s lead and focused on exporting its wine, mostly to the UK and the United States 6. Argentina now produces less wine than it did when domestic consumption was at an all-time high, but produces much higher quality wine.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, how the vines reach not just into the soil, but deep into the history of a place, twining together geography and politics and economics, food and culture and tradition? How connected it all is?
Our last glasses of wine of the day (or so we thought, anyways) were of the homemade brew of our bike tour company (only in Mendoza could such a sentence make sense). We drank a strong, young red and ordered double servings of empanadas, eating them two at a time before they’d even cooled enough to be palatable.
David the Spaniard and Adrian the Argentinian, from the trip to Aconcagua two days prior, also happened to be there; when we’d all drunk our fill of free wine, we ran to the bus together and journeyed home, where we stopped off for—what else—a filling steak dinner.
David and Adrian had made it into the wine museum and did get their free bottle of wine; they invited Anne and I to the roof that night to share it. We were tired, dehydrated, wined-out, and extremely ready for bed, but neither of us could think of a nice way to say no (while we were brainstorming one, David came by and told us that Adrian was waiting for us alone on the roof, wine already opened, making it impossible to beg off), so we trudged upstairs and asked for the tiniest possible pours.
I didn’t realize that David and Adrian were conspiring to find a way for Adrian and I to be alone until Anne, ever perceptive, pointed it out on her way downstairs to bed, having successfully chugged her thimble of wine, grimaced, and dashed off a goodbye. By that point, I couldn’t also leave (I tried, and then David said that he was leaving too and it would be rude to leave Adrian alone with half a glass of wine left).
So then we were two: me and Adrian sitting at a paintbare picnic table on the roof of a hostel in Mendoza’s Old Town, staring at an empty wineglass (mine), barely talking. Adrian speaks almost no English and is, in general, shy and reserved; it’d fallen on me during our happy hour to keep a conversation going, but I was in no mood to pick up the mantel of pleasantry. I was so frustrated, honestly, wanting nothing more than to go to bed and feeling like some combination of expectations and politeness weren’t allowing me to.
My frustration lasted until Adrian began to lean over the table to me, lips puckered, at which point I—bucking every instinct of politeness and deciding to just be rude—stood up abruptly, said that I needed to check into my flight tomorrow, and walked briskly down the stairs.
I’m still learning, even on a trip as me-centered (as hedonistic, even) as this one is to not care as much about what other people think, or what other people want, or what other people expect. Getting out of the world of New York overachievers (which, to be clear, I love and belong in, in a lot of ways) was hard enough; I knew I wanted to travel but I did think hard about what taking a year off to travel would do to my career or what future employers would think. And now, in situations like the one with Adrian, I find caring more about what literal strangers who I will likely never see again think of me than I do about people who may hold my future earnings potential in their hands. It’s illogical, but I feel actively bad about creating awkwardness or being rude in moments like that. I don’t understand it. Where do these bastions of propriety come from? How many uncomfortable situations have I let persist because I didn’t want to stir the pot? (At least a dozen come to mind immediately.) Why do I feel like I owe men who are interested in me more courtesy than I want to give? Is it because I feel like I’ve lead them on? Because I feel like I should appreciate their attention? How can I continue to hold on to things I deeply believe in—like being well-mannered—while also not doing things that I don’t want to do, particularly in situations like that one? Again, I have no answer, so for now I’ll just keep forcing myself to do what feels the most right, even if it’s at the cost of being the most pleasant.
End scene. My time in Mendoza was wonderful (even when the banks were on strike because their wages weren’t keeping up with inflation and the ATMs had no money for 3 days and I had spent my last 300 pesos cash on an impromptu pedicure before I learned that so I was stuck begging money off of strangers). My reunion with Anne was all I could’ve wished for and more (and there’s a chance we’ll overlap in Peru in a month or so and I am crossing my fingers for that so hard they’re cramping). I learned a lot—about wine, about meat, about myself, about the importance of female friendships, about the beauty of perfectly-planted vines making their way up a terrace and about the deeper beauty in their struggle to get there.
Author’s postscript:
After Mendoza, I went to Córdoba, then Buenos Aires, and then onwards to Uruguay, where I am right now. I didn’t love Córdoba (though I did love its lil boho Güermes neighborhood) and I did love Buenos Aires, but nothing so important happened in either place that sparked something I want to write about. That did happen in Uruguay, so I think I’ll focus my next big post on my time in this wonderful pais.
Some gratitudes, which I’ve gotten away from doing and want to get back to:
- Michael: Thank you for being an absolute gem of a human being—whether those facets are found in the care with which you review a piece of my writing or the authenticity with which you reflect on your life decisions or a million others, they are all equally mesmerizing and I’m so grateful to know you.
- Michelle: Thank you for being a world-traveling badass who inspires me on the regular. I love how brave and how honest you are. Brb, off to fill out a New Zealand work permit so we can be in the same country for a while.
- Camillinator: Thank you for giving the best boy advice a girl’s ever heard, and for loving what you love unapologetically and beautifully, and (and!) for COMING TO SEE ME IN A FEW WEEKS! Can’t hardly wait to be dating you again. Please make me do Kayla with you.