It really is hard to know where to start on the story of Mendoza. It has been a while since I wrote and that whole thing went by so damn fast, but I realize that it has been almost two weeks. It is also a bit hard to write a whole lot about the days there because it was mostly about just spending quality time getting to know a place.
I left Chile on the old 'cross the huge mountains' bus. It was as amazing as ever and I got into Mendoza in the early evening and had a night to kill before my bro Gabe was set to roll in. I ate at a place that night that would go on to become a standard for us...I don't remember the official name of it, because I was always distracted by this giant cow that they had sitting out on the sidewalk, and the restaurant quickly became known amongst us as "The Cow Place". Yeah, how gringo, I know. But still, it rocked hard, and we ate there a lot. Particularly these huge paninis that they would put on the grill. They had chicken and vegetbles and great flavor, way better than average in Argentina. Later on during the week we realized that they had aji hot sauce and me and the Gabester put away just about a whole bottle between the two of us. They also had an interesting version of chimichurri that we destroyed too. The waitress was like a growing-old-gracefully version of Sophie Marceau and I was immediately in love with her. I told Gabe to tell her that after I was gone and I hope he did. That lady was something else!! (This is all joking around.) Actually almost everything that happened in Mendoza was funny. I haven't laughed that long and hard for a really long time.
We originally had grand plans to work the harvest and those sort of changed based on my desire to go to Galapagos with Jake and Rebecca. So we had some winery visits set up and other than that the usual amount of brotherly debauchery to create. During the week we had a lot of adventures, but one of the funniest was our journey to the winery called Catena Zapata. It is a very high end winery, one that I have liked for a long time, so I was excited to go. We had been up really late and when the alarm went off that morning I was hungover and not interested in wine or anything at all aside from sleep. I managed to get to my feet and then I showered and then it was ok. We wandered the city to find the enigmatic spot where the buses left from for the town of Maipu...finally found it and then struggled through the stand up busride to get up there...more or less an hour of jutting and jolting old-bus steering. I was out of fuel when we arrived and was dying to eat something so we went directly to the one restaurant they had and had a hilarious lunch. We had been having a tough time getting any good food and Gabe had been getting the short end of the deal most of the time. Like ordering what he thought was one thing and getting another. I had some raviolis the day before that were literally swimming in oil...things like that. So that day we were really hoping for something good. He ordered a chicken sandwich and got a huge chunk of cow meat between bread (technically a sandwich, but that's it) meanwhile I got a beautiful looking tostado, that turned out to be full, and I mean full, of mayo. We didn't even get one of the things we ordered, but we were hungover and didn't have the energy to do much about it, so despite being "chaffed" (that was the word) we paid and left. The main plaza there was as perfect as any I've seen and the water in the giant central fountian was dyed to look like wine. We needed to get a cab to get to the actual winery so we found a place and called it up. A guy showed up and quoted us 20 pesos to go out to the place...he said he thought he knew where it was. It turned out that he didn't and we watched the clock quickly march right on by the time of our appointment. The guy drove here and there and we asked people and he radio-ed for directions. We finally found it and where almost a half an hour late, which means we were going to miss the tour. We were getting out of the cab and the guy says that we owe him for the time we drove around lost and that chaffed us even more. So we had a classic parking-lot fare battle with the guy. It was bullshit and he knew it and we ended up getting the ride back for free. We ended up seeing part of the tour still, but did miss some stuff and the 'high class' wine chicks that worked there frowned down their noses at us. When we got back to the cab, the guy had pulled up the back seat and folded it so that we would have to sit on the frame of the car beneath where the seat usually sits. "You gotta be kidding me." Gabe and I chimed in unison. The guy was not, in fact, kidding us. He had to roll that way so that the meter wouldn't read that we were there. (That's how much they trust the drivers in Argentina.) It was about a half hour of riding side saddle on the back seat rail, trying not to touch anything, in order to not set off the sensor. At one point the guy had to stop the cab on the side of the highway and I thought, alright, here is where he pulls the old 'get rid of the gringo' move. We were ready to defend ourselves in a continuation of our battle, but it turned out that he had really left the hood open a crack. So it was no big deal. By the time we ate dinner that night we were just glad to still be able to eat! Not the best of days, but it was hilarious.
These days, for Mateo, it is just nice to have someone to talk to in English. Someone that I know and have similar history with. That is a thing that I take for granted in my normal life sometimes. It is really a great pleasure in life to sit in a cafe or park and just talk to someone about the things that happen in life. We drank a lot of coffee last week, and even more wine. The wine selection is huge in Mendoza. Given that it is all from there. You see no wine at all from Chili or USA or Europe. We drank malbec and tempranillo and syrah and bonarda. Many bottles. Long into the night we would drink and laugh and tell stories. We did a bit of cooking which was a lot of fun despite the small kitchen of the hostel. It had three burners and anyone who knows me when I cook, I can easily use a six burner. The cutting board was concave, which really didn't end up mattering because I was cutting things with a steak knife. Not well equipped. We did some nice food though, considering. A penne dish with caramelized onions, zucchini and corn, another pasta dish with a chorizo sauce and the last night we did roasted chicken breasts with reggianito mashed potates, brocoli, fresh tomato and a local sausage buerre rouge. The last night we had a Luigi Bosca Vineyard designated Malbec, which was hands down the best wine of the week. Another cool surprise was that Telly, Gabe and I's boss in the wine bar in SF, (he's more our homey than our boss) sent a half bottle of 2001 Cahors with Gabe for when he met up with me. Gabe had that little bottle tucked in his pack for two months before we finally drank it, and it was a real treat when we did. That Telly is a hell of a guy. A real high class son of a bitch. It was so nice to drink something from Europe, because with the exception of one bottle, it is the only thing I have had from there since I was harvesting in Walla Walla.
I am going to keep this one short so that there is something to write in the next one, I did two so that there would be room for photos. It is hard to capsulize that time in Mendoza, because really it was about hanging out with my bro. We didn't climb any mountains or jump off any bridges, but it was just as fun as if we had!! Read on.
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