Mendoza and wine tasting (part 1)

We made it to Mendoza! The bus mad several stops to pick up more people, and for the first few hours I though I would never fall asleep. Next thing I knew, I was waking  up groggily as the sun was rising and we were stopping for breakfast, which was included in the bus ticket. It was a modest affair of cafe con leche (tea for me) and medialunas, but it held us over for the three hours or so of bus ride that remained until we arrived in Mendoza. Once we got there, we took a taxi to our hostel, which had a pet dog named Sara and a pet cat named Persiana, who loved to wrestle each other.

The hostel helped us arrange a wine tasting tour that would pick us up from the hostel and drop us off here when it was over (how convenient!) A common option for wine tasting is to do the bicycle tour, where you bus to the area of the wineries, rent a bike for the day and bike between the wineries (apparently BUIs aren't a thing in Argentina). Unfortunately, this was not a viable option for us because, as you probably know, I don't know how to ride a bike. This is, after all, the pedestrian life blog, not the cyclist life. If you want a more thorough explanation of the name of my blog, check out my very first post: the first post in the Semester at Sea blog.

Our wine tour was lead by a charismatic woman who joked about us getting tipsy for most of the trip. But, she also gave us a lot of interesting information while we were in transit to our first destination. We were in the area of Mendoa called Maipu, nicknamed  the "metropolis of wine", as about 60% of the wine from Mendoza comes from this area. There are about 1,900 bodegas (wineries) in Mendoza, and with 300 days of perfect sun a year, Argentinians call Mendoza the land of sun and wine. As California locals, Lindsay and I left right at home. 

Our first stop was an olive oil factory (acietera) called Pasai. Our guide was full of information (Lindsay and I were proud to catch most of it as it was all in Spanish). Some interesting highlights: this acietera uses three different varieties of olives; green and black olives are actually the same, just at a different point in their maturation; they harvest the olives when they are purple in color (between the green and black stages) because this is when the olives have the most oil; olive oil has a wide variety of health benefits, from the omega-3s to vitamins that do everything from soften skin to regulate cholesterol; to achieve all these benefits, the olive oil has to be raw, so you should drizzle it over food for flavor instead of just cooking with it; if you do cook with olive oil, you can cook at high temperatures as olive oil does not burn at cooking temperatures. 

We had a tour of the factory where they press the olive oil. As the olive is 50% water, 15-20% oil and the rest solids, it's quite a process that involves grinding the olives, pressing the pulp to collect the liquid, and then filtering out the oil from the water. The traditional process (which they still use in addition to more modern methods) takes about 48 hours to go from olive to olive oil. The modern process (which they just started using seven years or so ago) involves a centrifuge and takes only 20 minutes. 

Next, we got to taste different types of olive oil. We tasted many different kinds, all on little slices of fresh bread: the classic olive oil (which was delicious), unfiltered olive oil (which had little bits of olive skin and tasted more strongly of olive), garlic-flavored olive oil (which, when out on bread, made instant garlic bread), a basil-flavored olive oil with green olive paste, an oregano flavored olive oil on tomato paste, and sun dried tomatoes with regular olive oil. We also had some raisins and bits of chocolate to cleanse the palate.