Monday, April 14 marks the beginning of our wine odyssey. After our superb lunch at Azafran two days before, we decided that Familia Zuccardi would be a good vineyard to visit. When we called, they asked if we wanted to have lunch at the winery. We, of course, said yes. So with the morning open, we decided to start our adventures at La Rural Bodega, which also has a wine making museum.
Now, it is important to know that wine tours in Mendoza are conducted in English and in Spanish. Most offer free tours, some vineyards charge for a tasting and all of them want you to buy their wine. The wine tour itself usually entails a greeting, the showing of the wine making machinery, a view of the vats used for the fermentation, a brisk tour through the wine aging and storage facilities and a finish that includes a tasting or two of wine. This is the normal arc of a wine tour, no matter if you are in Neuquén, Mendoza, or San Juan. And while it seems rather straight forward and hard to screw up, you would be surprised.
So we arrived at La Rural, and the grounds are quaint and beautiful. We are ushered into this giant room filled with enormous, old, wooden barrels. We are a few minutes early and are told that the tour will begin soon. So we make our way to an adjoining room that has thousands of wine making instruments – literally thousands of parts and pieces and presses and barrels and bottles and whatever else is needed to make wine. The tour begins, the guide asks if English is okay – half the people are Spanish speakers – and then she says, “This is the room that is our museum. It has equipment dating back to the 17th century. Over there you will see that they used to press the grapes by standing in a leather hide that is pulled taught and then the juice would be stored in big clay pots that were under ground as that picture says. We have come a long way since then with our wine technology as you will see. Okay, now we will give you 5 minutes to look at the museum and after that we will begin our tour.” Everyone begins to mill around the room and then we gather together and the tour guide asks, “Any questions about this?” And she began to lead us to where the wine is made. Some museum tour!
We make our way into this warehouse, and we are shown the machine that the grapes are loaded onto, and how it separates the grape and the stem, and how with the grapes used for white wine it presses the juice and sends it through the pipes and tubes into the tanks but for grapes for red wine the grapes are crushed and the seeds and skin stay with the wine and pumped through the pipes and tubes into the tanks. We are then shown the tanks. We are then told that the white wine needs x number of days to ferment and the red needs x number more of days. And then she says that the red wine is stored in barrels for a certain amount of time and then they wine is filtered and bottled. And it was cold that day. And the floor is cold and the warehouse is cold. And she so when she says, “Okay, who wants to try some wine?” Everyone replies, “Yes, I do!”
So we are shuttled back into the main entry room with the giant barrels and a team of 8 young things who work the counter are milling about and our guide gets a bottle of wine and pours us each a glass (it is close to 11 a.m. in the morning) and tells us that this wine is their Cabernet. It tastes okay. We are not offered a second wine to try and instead are asked if we want to buy anything. Many of us gently demur and the conversation stops. We are asked if there are any questions. There are no questions. We decide to go to look at the merchandising. In so doing, I realize that La Rural makes San Felipe – one of the most common table wines in the country.
So is this what wine tours are all about? I ask Sarah and she shrugs her shoulders and we decide that we don’t want to buy anything. Tara agrees – not much to buy here. We decide to take some more photos and use the bathroom and head on our way to Familia Zuccardi as our lunch reservation is for 1 p.m.
We arrive at Familia Zuccardi and the grounds are spectacular and never ending. They have awning covered parking for the cars and we have to sign in at the guardhouse. We are told that we are early and asked if we want to join a wine tour. We say yes. We wait outside and then are called in and are told that since a wine tour will be starting in 15 minutes, we can join another wine group that is in the tasting room. We shrug our shoulders and say why not.
We are in the middle of the tasting, probably trying one of the lower end Malbecs and we are asked if we want to join an English group for a tour or stay with the Spanish speaking group. We decide on the Spanish speaking tour and that allows us to continue with the tasting. We try 2 more wines. We have not eaten since breakfast and already we have tried 5 small glasses of wine.
The tour begins. We quickly realize that Familia Zuccardi is HUGE. They produce so much wine that it might be best to just call them Familia Budweiser. They bottle millions of bottles of wine. They have the Santa Julia line, the Santa Julia Reserva, the Zuccardi line, the Q line, and the Z line. The Z is their premium and the Santa Julia is their low end. They make whites, roses, reds, and desert wines. Our tour lasts for well over an hour. We see their stainless steel tanks for the whites. We see the stainless steel tanks for the reds. They are all enormous and hold a ridiculous amount of liquid – maybe 40,000 liters each. Then we are shown the stainless steel tanks for the premium lines, they are smaller but still large able to hold up to 25,000 liters each. Then we are shown the room with the oak barrels. We are shown just about everything and the tour is filled with details about wine that we never knew (remember that we are novices) like always using new oak barrels for each year of the aging with the premium wines, the fact that premium lines of wines usually requires pruning of the grape vines so that there are less but more potent and flavorful grapes in the harvest, that damaged seeds can ruin a wine in the fermentation process and thus the machines are made to smash the grape but in a way that keeps the seeds intact, etc. etc.
We are amazed and enlightened and probably a little tipsy from the wine tasting that occurred before the tour. So we are surprised when we are led back into the tasting room for another round. Yee-haw! Four more bottles, four different bottles than the earlier tasting. And we swirl, sniff and sip with a newly educated wine mind. We laugh with the tour guide and are all smiles as we make our way to lunch.
The lunch room is housed in its own elegant building. Stone patios, terraces with vines, fires in the fireplace and big tables with big chairs help create the atmosphere of opulence. We are shown to our seats and asked if we want the grilled meat lunch. We say yes and they start pouring wine. The whites are paired with the appetizers, the reds start with the soups or salads, the meat comes out on platters and we can choose the cuts we want, and, of course, the desert wine comes out with the desert. It was lovely and they even had some of their olive oil, a business market they are trying to break into. Even though the meat was a little tough (very odd, we though considering that we were in Argentina), it was good nonetheless. The service was great as they didn’t push and they kept the wine flowing.
After our cafes we ambled back over to the store full of merchandise and began to yuck it up with the tour guides, one of whom was from England. When they asked which wines we had tried, we listed the 4 with lunch, the 4 with the first tasting and the 4 with the second tasting, and he raised his eyebrows and said, “Right, you all have done quite well for yourselves, haven’t you?” We bought a couple of small things, including some olive oil and made our way back into Mendoza. It must have been close to 4 p.m.
Phew! These bodegas can be tough work. Even though Familia Zuccardi was the Budweiser of wine makers, we thought the tour to be miles ahead of La Rural, which had the feel of a smaller winery. We were happy to have visited this winery and were ready to explore the different bodegas in the area.
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