We got up this morning and went down for breakfast around 9:30. Jay is starting to get a cold so didn't want to workout this morning but I made him promise we would do it this afternoon because we have the wine tasting and I heard its lots of food and wine. So after breakfast we went back to the room and he watched The Crown on Netflix while I did some work and caught up on the blog from the previous 2 days.
We met in the lobby at 11:45am to go to the wine tasting, about a 10 minute drive from the hotel. We didn't go to the vinyard (which is what everyone thought we were doing) because its an hour and a half flight out of the city, but they have a house in the city set up for tastings and events. Here we were split into two groups into two separate rooms to sit, sip and snack. In our group was MaryAnne and Dave, Jay and I, Gabriel and his sister Andrea from Quebec City (Andrea is the one in the heels, Gabriel is the advisor and he is blind) and Mike and Janet (Mike works with the same company Jay does in Toronto only in Winnipeg and his wife is a lawyer).
Argentinian wines, for the most part come from the Mendoza Region. The Mendoze region has 330 sunny days a year, it is a desert. The wine is very dark, which is typical of sunny wines because the sun concentrates the pigmentation, you can't see through it at all. Because they don't get rain they use artificial irrigation and can give the grapes exactly the amount of water needed. The whites are generally dry and in Argentina it is prohibited from adding sugar to their wines. He also said that whites should be served between 8-10 degrees and the best way to cool a wine is in a bucket of cold water with a dozen or so ice cubes floating in it so it doesn't get so cold that you can no longer taste the complexity of the wine.
The poured us 5 glasses of wine starting with a Torrontes.
In Argentina the Torrontes was not fashionable for the people to drink and was primarily exported to the UK and Finland. It is considered a 100% Argentine grape and became more famous abroad than it has in Argentina. It pairs with regional foods of the North of Argentina, which are more spicy or Thai, Indian or Vietnamese. I found it very acidic and grapefruity.
Next we had a Malbec Rose.
Malbec is the National Grape of Argentina, but its not Argentinian and they will now admit that it originally came from Chile in the mid 19th Century. Argentina and Chile are not friends and compete about everything, so it took a long time for them to admit that the Malbec originated there. The Malbec grape had been mismanaged for 100 years he said. They used to use Malbec grapes just to colour wine because the skin is highly tinted, not to produce a wine of its own.
Up to 30 years ago the Malbec Rose was considered a cheap wine, but is now becoming more fashionable.
The Malbec Rose is aged 4 months in Acacia barrels, which are milder than Oak barrels. And, like most whites, is not a storing wine so can only be kept up to a year. It would pair with some cheeses, pasta with a light sauce or appetizers and would be considered a summer wine. It was my favourite.
Next we had a 2014 Blend (Coupage).
It was a blend of 33% each Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. They harvest the 3 grapes, Merlot is a short cycle and so is harvested in Feb, Malbec at the end of March and the Cab Sauv in April. They make all 3 separately in ceramic pools and after fermentation age them in separate Oak barrels for 12 months. Then the wine maker will blend the 3 according to the tastes and depending on the natural aromaterial. The percentage will change from year to year.
Next we had the Villa Blanca Malbec 2010.
This one can be a storing wine, it can be stored up to 14 years (2024) and is the grape level 1, which is the best quality of grape that will have the strongest concentration at 26% sugar and up to 15% alcohol. Its made in small batches and is stored in heavy, thick magnum bottles. Over time as it is stored it will lose the fruity flavours and will become more smoky, leathery, spicy or peppery. He says it is 'excellence of complexity'. He said the best way to do a wine tasting is to do a vertical tasting - taste several vintages of the same wine so that you can taste the difference through the storing process. He said though that Argentinians are an anxious people and like young wines, because they don't like to store wine in case they won't get a chance to drink it in the future. This wine had legs, which here they call tears, and it was also very dry. I actually didn't like any of the wines that we tasted very much, they were all dry and oak aged. But I really enjoyed a few other Malbecs while we were here.
He said that tannins are like the skeletons of the wine and must be matched properly to your foods. This wine should be paired with lamb, pork or red meat because the fats in the meat will lubricate your mouth against the tannins. And aftertaste he said is a wine with a long memory. And a wine with more complexity requires a bigger glass to preserve the bouquet.
The final wine that we had was a Bonarda grape.
The Bonarda grape has an Italian origin. In 1998 the winery bought a parcel of land in Mendoza that had the Bonarda vines and the owner told the wine maker to till the land and plant Malbec vines. The wine maker asked permission to keep the 20 hectares with the Bonarda and worked two years in the vineyard and in 2000 produced an excellent quality Bonarda, aged it in French Oak (never American) and submitted it to a blind test at the Verona wine fair (VinItaly) where it won a Gold metal. The Bonarda is also a storing wine and now other wineries are also offering the Bonarda as part of their vintages - and soon maybe it will become known as the second National grape (also not from Argentina! lol). It has a velvety sensation due to the gycerol and pH. It can be paired with pork with a sweet dressing, pasta with mushrooms, Armenian or Arabian food - something relatively strong.
After we were done tasting all the wine they brought out a series of appetizers, sweet corn empanadas, chicken skewers, cheese, ham, proscuitto, guacamole and egg, sushi rolls and a little cheese biscuit with a smoky tomato paste on it that was delicious. Everyone was buzzing and the little bit of food didn't help - and then they offered you more wine, whichever you wanted as a glass.
As we left they gave us a bottle of wine, not one of the ones that we tried, but we each got one to take home.
Now it was 3pm. lol. And we're back at the hotel. Jay and I did a workout and then went down to the pool area to chill out before we had to get ready to go to dinner and meet in the lobby at 6:45pm. Jay only stayed outside for a few minutes because it was too bright to watch Netflix on his iPad. I read for a bit and finished the blog by the pool until about 6pm and then went up to get ready.
We had dinner by the Port, an area we hadn't been to before and had dinner in a really cool old restaurant. A lot of the buildings in this area, which they call the British area, are brick and the bricks were brought to Argentina as the ballasts in the British ships and used to build the buildings. Up until 20 years ago the whole area was abandoned, but now it is the trendiest area in the city to live (much like the distillery district in Toronto).
Dinner was good, we sat with Mike and Janet and chatted all through dinner which was another 3 course meal - they sure know how to feed you here. After dinner we took the bus back to the hotel and went to bed. As they announced that the first bus was leaving we rushed outside, lol, and saw MaryAnne and Dave and said "Fancy seeing you on the first bus MaryAnne"...then later when we got to the hotel we were the first ones inside and ducked to the left as everyone else was being herded to the right up to the bar for the after party and MaryAnne saw and and walked over saying "Dana and Jason, come on lets to upstairs" as she pushed us towards the elevators to avoid going herself. I really like her!
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