Having somehow managed to spend 3 weeks in Mendoza and not visit a single winery, I finally rectified the situation today with a wine tasting trip in Luján de Cuyo.
The tour consisted of 4 wineries, the first called Achavel Ferrer. It isn’t a typical winery for the area – it has a special fermentation process, using special concrete vats rather than stainless steel ones. This allows them to ferment at higher temperatures for shorter periods of time, as the concrete is less prone to changes in temperature – a temperature rise of only 1°C would kill the yeast. They only produce small amounts of wine, around 200,000 bottles a year (a medium sized winery producing a million).
Halfway through the tour we were joined by another group, of some Americans and French people. They were slightly intimidating as they obviously thought of themselves somewhat as wine connoisseurs and seemed to know all the technical questions to ask the guide. Having said that, they were quite useful later for learning the etiquette involved in the wine tasting itself! We got to try 5 different wines – a basic Malbec, a blended wine, and a top range Malbec of 3 varieties, produced from identical grapes, harvested at the same time, but grown in different soil types at different altitudes. I was surprised at how much this affected the taste!
