Re-cycled Wine

On our bus ride from Bariloche we'd met a great couple called Adam and Laureen and we'd agreed to meet up with them on our second day in Mendoza.

Mr Hugo owns a bike hire company in the winelands and sets people off every day with personalised wine tasting tours of various vineyards .....on bikes.  This is the cheapest way of seeing (& tasting) the local wines rather than paying for an expensive guide.

We'd been told that there are plenty of tourist police about, especially in the afternoons, to assist tipsy cyclists back to whence they came!

We picked Adam and Laureen up in a taxi and arrived at Mr Hugo's around 10:30am, picked up our bikes and were given our maps of the wineries to visit. We completed our contact forms which included a section with our hotel address so they'd know where to ship us too if we were unable to do it ourselves at the end of the day!

First on our list was the wine museum. Adam suggested we go there first whilst we were still vaguely interested!!

Selfie stick gets another outing:

Some ancient carts used to transport barrels of wine

Some enormous barrels to hold an enormous amount of Argentinean Malbec!

Having done a wine tour in South Africa on honeymoon in 2009 where spit buckets and minute samples of wine were given, we were completely surprised that here in Mendoza, they have full glasses of wine and absolutely no sign of a spit bucket! This day could go very, very wrong!

In the end we asked each winery to pour us half glasses and we decided to visit just 3 wineries and an olive oil making place where we sampled some interesting olive products and, strangely, some home made liquors!

One handed selfie whilst cycling proves either I was sober enough to do it or drunk enough to try!! There were 4 other similar pictures that looked like the other 3 were following a giant boiled egg! Luckily I got my eyes in this shot!

Most of the way there were cycle lanes which was handy apart from the fact that they were 90% pot hole and 10% cycle lane!

We were very sensible and restrained and set off from the last Vineyard just in time to get collected by our taxi driver friend, Carlos (who was definitely a glass half empty guy and was convinced at some point in our trip we'd be held at knifepoint)!

Lauren and I figured it was our duty to introduce Adam and Laureen to the best Mojitos in town (still £2 each!) and the evening finished with a juicy steak and a bottle of Malbec (for a change)!