Wineries
The Avenue San Martin starts in Mendoza and runs through the wine growing region to the south of the city. The scenery is dominated by the 3000 m and higher peaks of Andes.
We caught the bus to Bodega Norton on the first day. We had a seemingly authoritive map that placed all the wineries near to each other, they turned out to be 10km appart, which makes sense when you think how many grapes are needed. Bodega Norton is absoulutely huge, churning out 80 million bottles of wine a year.
It was a bit of a wine education to see them saying that their Bodega Norton range was basically table wine from the huge barrels above, all their good stuff was in the Perdriel range and above - indeed, tasting the Norton and Perdriel wines, they were very similar but the Perdriel was so much smoother.
We went down by bikes the next day, we`d booked a tour at Catena Zapata which I`d heard was very good. It was. Its owner is slightly famous, he only really started 10 years ago and decided to put his best wines up against the best from Bordeaux and California- and they came out on top. Again, the bottle-label is far more important than the year or grape or reserva status - Angelica beats Saint Felician beats Los Alamos.
-the Catena Zapata "winery", actually the showing off building, the wine is made in a huge warehouse behind.
We`ve been splurging a bit on good bottles of wine. It seems expensive at 5pounds a bottle, but its so nice. Its also the foreknowledge that this is the last chance for good cheap wine in the entire trip.
By the way, I`m fiddling with the image settings, so if the web page looks a bit strange thats why. You should be able to get high-res versions of all of these photos by clicking on them and then fiddling about in flickr - click on "All Sizes" in flickr.
We caught the bus to Bodega Norton on the first day. We had a seemingly authoritive map that placed all the wineries near to each other, they turned out to be 10km appart, which makes sense when you think how many grapes are needed. Bodega Norton is absoulutely huge, churning out 80 million bottles of wine a year.
It was a bit of a wine education to see them saying that their Bodega Norton range was basically table wine from the huge barrels above, all their good stuff was in the Perdriel range and above - indeed, tasting the Norton and Perdriel wines, they were very similar but the Perdriel was so much smoother.
We went down by bikes the next day, we`d booked a tour at Catena Zapata which I`d heard was very good. It was. Its owner is slightly famous, he only really started 10 years ago and decided to put his best wines up against the best from Bordeaux and California- and they came out on top. Again, the bottle-label is far more important than the year or grape or reserva status - Angelica beats Saint Felician beats Los Alamos.
-the Catena Zapata "winery", actually the showing off building, the wine is made in a huge warehouse behind.
We`ve been splurging a bit on good bottles of wine. It seems expensive at 5pounds a bottle, but its so nice. Its also the foreknowledge that this is the last chance for good cheap wine in the entire trip.
By the way, I`m fiddling with the image settings, so if the web page looks a bit strange thats why. You should be able to get high-res versions of all of these photos by clicking on them and then fiddling about in flickr - click on "All Sizes" in flickr.
posted by Matt and Lizzie at
8:24 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home