Swish This

I came to Mendoza to drink. Not to drink in the over-indulgent collegiate sense which I am accustomed; but to sniff, swish and sip like a cultured connoisseur. My glass was to be raised not in toast, but in observation of consistency and character. What better setting to train my tongue to the delectable subtleties of the world´s best wines than Mendoza´s annual harvest festival?

The city was done up like a child on Easter Sunday: clean, neat, and seemingly more innocent and wholesome than normal. While Mendoza´s festive atmosphere catered to its international guests, I learned over the week that the festival was a local celebration. Tourists there to soak up the ultimate Mendoza experience, like myself, were only spectators to the festivals true significance.

My stay there began as intended. Chris, Megan and I, along with a Brit, an Israeli, and two nineteen year old Dutch girls, rented bikes and did a self guided wine tour in the town of Maipu. After a quick breeze through a wine museum where we enjoyed the heavy handed pours of our disenchanted and most likely alcoholic tour guide, we peddled to a small, family owned vineyard called CarniaE. Owned by a French couple and named after the constellation hovering above Mendoza, CarinaE produced around 70,000 bottles of wine per year. The French owners bought and refurbished the vineyard quiet recently. Prior to that, it existed as a plot of rampant weeds and shambled equipment. Despite years of inactivity and neglect, the vineyard´s soil required it to be organized just as the original winemakers had. Malbec grapes in one designated area, Cabernet Sauvignon in another. This enduring control of nature intrigued me. After the tour, we sat under the extended reach of a tree at a long picnic table and tasted wines.

I held each sip in my mouth, aerating it, and mentally narrowing the focus of my pallet like adjusting the knobs of a microscope. Each wine danced a different jig over my taste buds. I struggled to compartmentalize the experience from each. The French owner, a stout women, teeth ink stained from testing the product, offered a pour of their best wine. I shelled out the ten pesos for a taste of the high end, seeing this as an optimal opportunity to mentally distinguish to good from the great.

Muddy red, the malbec´s full body denied the slightest knife of light to cut through it. Burying my nose in the glass, a spicy assault gripped the inner nerves of my nostrils. I delectably drew a sip from the glass, its tannins pulled at the soft spots beneath my ears. A flavor parade marched over my senses- too quick to register. Sucking air through my lips, creating the belly of a star fish below my nose, I lit the wine´s short fuse. Quickly, new tastes exploded from the sip. The wine´s blooming character mesmerised my mouth with its Pollock-like complexity. I began to imagine the barrel this sip patiently sat in; buried deep in the cellar´s dankest corner, wearing a growing blanket of dust. The old French winemaker hobbles down the alley of horizontal barrels to the dim, back corner. He drags out a little stool, and blows the faint dust from the glass left from his last visit. He squats on the miniature stool, his knees bent beyond ninety degrees like a shoeshine. Twisting the tap with the greatest of care, he draws out the slightest of samples like a humming bird. His fingers pinch the glass´s stem, dirt has collected under his nails. He silently goes through his rituals. Smell. Swift. Smell. Sip. Wait. Swallow. He looks up to the barrel, the date scrawled across the top in white chalk, and engages his creation. ¨Not yet¨, he whispers.

I swallowed the image with the sip and smiled. Chris then raised his hand, and stole the women´s attention from me: ¨Do you have any chips?¨

Our final stop was at the Trapiche vineyard. Enormous and industrial, this particular Trapiche winery produced seven million bottles of reserve wines. Chris and some other members of my company were not keen on paying the twenty pesos for a tour and decided to skip out. This did not make much sense to me. We were at the Eiffel Tower of wine regions, and they weren´t going to the top.

Passing through the automated sliding doors, I was embraced by the buildings icey airconditioning. Dehydrated and mildly intoxicated, the cool was sobering. Everything was stainless steel and mechanical within. Trapiche´s process for mass production seemed to rob the human aspect of wine making that I came to love at the first, family owned vineyard. Tasting its wines I did not imagine a sweet, little old man in a tattered cap; but a drone dressed in a blue surgical suite equipped with booties and a hair net, pouring wine samples into graduated cylinders and testing their Ph levels. Observing this juxtaposition between the two vineyards taught me which winemakers I prefer.