The grape escape - Cafayate, Argentina
Cafayate, Argentina
For those who know us, you'll know there are two things that we are pretty passionate about and you could say almost religious about when we are at home - exercising and wine, especially red wine. The two things which we have had a distinct lack of up until now on our travels. Cafayate promised both wine and exercise in tandem which seemed like a perfect combination to us. Cafayate is set 1,600 metres above sea level, surrounded by steep mountains and boasts an average of 300 sunny days per year. It also has some of the best vineyards in Argentina. Although the majority of the wine produced in this region is kept in Argentina and none at all is distributed to Europe. The small amount that is exported is sold in Brazil. We arrived in Cafayate after an uneventful bus ride for once, we drove through a barren wilderness with the occasional rock formation and saw nothing much else until we arrived in the sweet little town of Cafayate. The owner of our hostel was waiting at the bus station and pointed us in the right direction, its always a good sign when you can walk to your hostel rather than getting a taxi, we always prefer the smaller and more remote places. The hostel in all honesty was not that great but the people who ran it were fantastic and made us feel so welcome. After being there for 20 minutes or so, they were pointing us in the direction of all the bodegas (wineries) that were within walking distance of the hostel and asked if we wanted barbecue that night. We were a little bit unsure what to expect as neither of us had been to a bodega before, apparently you just walk in and ask to taste the wine and most of the time it's free. It seemed a bit bizarre that you can just walk in and ask for wine without signing up for a tour or tasting session but that's exactly how it worked. We did sign up for a tour at what turned out to be our favourite bodega. While we were waiting for the tour to start we had 25 minutes to kill so rather than just hanging around we thought we would make good use of our time and pop down the road to a different bodega where you could just walk in and ask to taste some of the wines. It worked just like how we had been told. Walk in and ask in Spanglish if we could try some of their wines, then they poured us a few different ones. We weren't overly fond of the wine we tried so didn't buy a bottle or go back there again. The tour we did at Bodega Nanni was in Spanish but we got the general point of what was being said about how the wine was made and stored. One of the unique things about the wine produced at this bodega is that it is totally organic. Thankfully the tour and and talking bit didn't last for too long and we were soon sipping the first of four different wines on offer. At home we love Argentinian red wine so you can imagine our surprise when the red wine didn't really do it for us but we both loved the white. We put it down to the hot climate. The wine is made from the Torrontes grape and is only produced in Argentina, it's considered to be the best grape of its kind in the world and we can definitely see why, it takes a lot for us to deviate from our beloved red. We also tried the Torrontes dessert wine which was not to our pallets, it was very sickly sweet and we couldn't drink more than a few sips of it - we are becoming very cultured no? There was only one way to finish off the tasting session, it was a hot and sunny afternoon and the beautiful garden in the bodega was beckoning us so we bought a bottle of the Torrontes - the tasting just wasn't enough, we needed more and it worked out at about £2.50 a bottle, bargain! As we made our way through the bottle and began to fall in love even more with this wine there was only one thought going through our heads "we need to buy another bottle to take back to the hostel" and so we did. We went back to that same bodega for a meal one night because the food on the menu sounded great, lots of fancy sounding salads and pastas and different to the usual steak, chicken, sausages and more steak. The food was nice but nowhere near as good as the wine. In Cafayate you can spend days cycling around the bodegas and sampling the local wines, but if you've had enough of that, you can always try the famous wine ice cream or go to a local farm to try the home made organic goats cheese. We spent one of our days in Cafayate on bikes cycling to a few different bodegas, one of the great things about the wineries in Cafayate is they are so close to the small town and the roads are really quiet so you don't need to dodge much traffic. A one hour ride up one road and you can visit four different bodegas and it's the same story if you go in the opposite direction on the same main road out of town. So after cycling through countless bodegas and sampling a few wines we were hot and tired..."shall we stop off for a wine ice cream?"..."yeah good idea". We went to Heladeria Miranda which is a bit of an institution in Cafayate and famous for its wine ice cream. We tried the Torrontes and the Cabernet, it was more like a sorbet and a lot stronger than we expected. In fact it was just like a frozen glass of wine served on a cone. It went down a treat but we couldn't decide which we preferred so kept swapping with each other until they were finished. We mentioned goats cheese as well and one of the best meals we have had for a while was a goats cheese and walnut salad made by Caz. Even for me it was one of the best meals we've had and no steak was involved! We went to the goats cheese farm up the road to buy some which normally involves a little tour around the farm and you get to try lots of different flavoured cheeses. We didn't get to do the tour as the day and time we visited the farm, without exaggerating, there were around 70 kids, two bus loads full in fact. To make it worse we had tried to visit the farm earlier but there was an impromptu siesta in effect. The place is normally open 9am-6pm but that day they decided 1pm-3pm was time for sleeping. We went back to the hostel for a while then left with the intention of arriving at 4pm to give the people at the farm enough time to wake up and get organised after their siesta. Evidently this was a bad move, we arrived just in time to see all the kids getting off the buses and making lots of noise. It was obvious our idea of a peaceful, leisurely stroll around the farm had been destroyed. We quickly ditched the tour idea and decided to just buy some cheese instead. Easier said than done. We somehow got mixed up in a group of kids who were just about to do the cheese tasting and the woman in charge thought we were unruly children who wanted to buy cheese before anyone else. We hoped that our lack of Spanish and blanco (white) appearance or the fact Dan was sporting a beard would have singled us out, but somehow it didn't. She didn't realise we were tourists and not in the group of local kids on a school trip, this was either a compliment to our Spanglish or more of a reflection of her total despair at having so many kids on her farm running around and screaming in what we assumed was joy. We had a barbecue on our first night in the hostel - we've quickly discovered that this is the best way to meet and socialise with Argentinians. I (Dan) went with the hostel owner (Fernando) to go and buy the meat, he was trying to teach me how to judge the quality and what the best cuts are. The way it works in Argentina is whoever is organising the barbecue finds out how many people are coming and buys roughly 500 grams of meat per male attendant - females do not form part of this calculation "me man, me eat meat", its assumed the men will eat less than 500 grams leaving surplus for the girls to eat. After sorting the meat he then heads to the off licence and buys as much drink as he thinks is needed and then the bill is split equally between everyone at the end. There were a few Europeans, a couple of Fernando's friends and other South American travellers. It's definitely a lot easier to communicate after a few drinks and over a big plate of meat. The barbecue is usually going for well over 4 hours and the various cuts of meat come out at different times depending on how long they need to cook...a bit like a meat tasting menu. At the barbecue we also had our first few questions about the Falklands and what we thought about the situation. We think they were asking more out of curiosity rather than their genuine belief that they belong to Argentina. A few English people we met in Bolivia warned us that we would get these questions. It maybe relatively old news in England but before the Argentinian president fell ill a few months ago, with her ratings plummeting due to the ridiculous inflation situation here, she reignited the debate and claimed Argentina would take them back. We are planning to do a bit more reading around the subject in case we get quizzed again or we could just respond with "they belong to Argentina, we should give them back". The conversations soon steered away from 'those islands' and back to meat, football and of course the quality of the wine in Cafayate. Cafayate is a popular tourist destination in Argentina but most tend to visit on a day trip but we definitely preferred to stay a few nights and explore the scenery and bodegas by bike without the need to rush. It gave us more chance to enjoy the peace and quiet...and the chance to try some more wine!