Cafayete

From the Quilmes ruins, we continued on to Cafayete.  Now churches and indigenous ruins are all very nice and cultural, but Cafayete is all about the wine, and that makes it my kind of town!

Wine barrels at Nanni

We arrived late afternoon, so had to hit the vineyards as soon as we got there, and we managed to fit in two bodegas, Nanni and Domingo Molinas. This was something that I had been looking forward to for a while because the higher altitude in this area means that we are in Torrontes territory.

Torrentes is a white grape that is native to, and probably unique to Argentina. Although the wine smells quite sweet, it is generally quite dry.  But unlike a sauvignon it has a much softer and fruitier taste.  And thanks to our visits to Gaucho Restaurants in London, Torrontes had already become one of my favourite varieties of wine.

Nanni wines

Obviously we had already been drinking a few bottles since arriving in Argentina, but I was still keen to try them at source.  And we started with a Bodega called Nanni.  While we were waiting there we were accosted by a few people from a group of Argentinians studying tourism who wanted to practice their English, so we had a brief chat with them about where we were all from and where we were going to be visiting.  Nanni is a small bodega that doesn’t just use Torrontes grapes, they also make a rose and reds from Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Bonnardi and Tannat.   Because they only produce relatively few bottles, many of the processes are low tech, including topping up the wine levels and sticking on the labels by hand.  We tasted four wines and Nic and I bought three bottles.

The next stop was Domingo Molinas.  This is a much larger winery and produces far more wine, including its speciality of 5 litre bottles.  These big – no huge – bottles are not their best wines, but they are still OK and in fact were the ones that Kevin had given us on the second day at the estancia.  We tried a couple of their wines and again managed to take a couple away with us.  Only the regular sized bottles though, not the huge ones.  We also tried their goats cheese.  The making of the goats cheese runs neatly with the winery as they use the leftover grape flesh and skins as goat feed, and use the manure to fertilise the vines.  The cheese was quite nice, so we had some of that too.

Our meat on the barbecue

 With our bottles clinking, it was time to head back to the campsite, put up out tents and my cooking group had to prepare the salad to go with the barbecue.  As ever, barbecues take a while to get going, so dinner wasn’t early.  And there was a lot of meat to be cooked.  I said that we had shopped for the meat in the morning, and Dave and Ivan’s suggestion of 500-800 grams of meat each was something of a challenge which we felt we had to rise to, so Nic and I ended up with about 1700 grams of steak and four sausages between us.  A few others had similarly large amounts of meat, but none of them actually finished theirs; we of course did, having had plenty of practice whilst in BsAs.

Nic cooking our meat