Mendoza Argentina Valle de Uco

This week I’m trying something new. I’m doing photo-blog posts on our time in Argentina. Today is Week 4: Wineries In Valle de Uco. I hope you enjoy!

This photo has nothing to do with Valle de Uco, but I like it so I’m including it – and we did spend the morning cycling and hiking in Villa La Angostura before heading north.

There’s a slight intermission in our road trip here which I can’t illustrate with photos: it was pouring rain and cold and miserable so we stopped off at a hostel in the picturesque San Martin de Los Andes for a couple of days. The weather in the area wasn’t showing any sign of improving so we hit the fabled Route 40 north towards Mendoza and sunshine.

Picture, if you will, after ten hours driving, you’re on a grit road in high, dry desert conditions. You haven’t seen a car or a person for hours and the GPS unit is saying that you’re at least an hour from a town of any size when your engine sputters and stops. You fiddle with battery connections and try to push your very heavy campervan to the side of the road. Once. Twice. Three times. Things are starting to look a little sticky. But whew, you manage to keep going until you’re back on paved road and everything seems to be functioning normally. Finding an unsigned municipal campground at 2am? No problem.

By the time we parked by the river in the scenic Canyon de Atuel the following day we were ready for a break.

But the fabled Argentinian Malbecs were calling and so we continued on to Valle de Uco stopping for a night at Historico Manzana, where Jose de San Martin stopped on his way back to Argentina. The monument to this great hero is massive. (Yep, that’s me ad-libbing on about Argentinian history again. What did you expect?)

Not to mention this, em, interesting road-marker around the corner…

Grubby from a long road-trip and the lack of hot water at the municipal campground, we pulled into the architecturally arresting O.Fournier for lunch.

There followed a couple of days (including Thanksgiving) of luscious wine-tasting and sumptuous food in the stylish Salentein bodega, a sprawling complex which includes a winery, a posada (inn), an art gallery and a church. It was hard to leave.