Travel hiccups aside (I promise I won’t complain about Flybondi again…), getting to Mendoza was quite easy and the rental car pickup got us on the way to our first stop of the trip – La Celia, about 2 hours south of Mendoza. This was a phenomenal first stop and really set the bar high for the rest of the trip – at 11pm, we were greeted with dinner and excellent wine to make up for the late arrival of our flight. Nice! The following day, the folks there helped show us around the (closed) winery and explain their unique fermentation tanks – ok, maybe not so unique since every other Mendoza winery also had them… Regardless, the stay at La Celia was phenomenal and when we expressed the slightest interest in having an asado (Argentine BBQ) for dinner that night, a few hours later we were greeted with more meat cooking than a family of 4 should have in a week. Super nice!

La Celia aside, the wineries are the real star of Mendoza – and boy did we visit some wineries. In order of (personal) preference, we hit the following places in the Mendoza area:

• Zuccardi – Pricey tasting but well worth it, with a tour more reminiscent of an architectural visit than a wine-making tour… wines are quite good too!
• Cecchin – Small, but great tasting wines! Not too heavily focused on the sweet wines too…
• 1870Essencia – I can’t say their sweet wines knocked my socks off, but they weren’t offensive. The tour itself and the old historic building was really cool though!
• Don Manuel Villafane – Cool building and relatively informative tour, but not the best wines… too sweet for me and I love my liquid diabetes.
• Alfa Crux – Not really the worst of the bunch, but we just didn’t even get to try the wine. In their defense, they probably don’t expect many people to show up at 10am on a Sunday for just a cup of wine… cool building though!

When we finally sobered up from all of this wine-drinking, we set out on a beefy 3hr drive from Mendoza through the Andes, ultimately making it a few km away from the Chilean border, all to see one thing – Aconcagua. If you’re like me, you probably knew it was a big mountain (if you’d ever heard of it…) and not much more… But thankfully I have some much more knowledgeable in-laws who quickly educated me that we were about 150km away from the tallest peak in both the western hemisphere, and the southern hemisphere! What’s even more impressive about this is that despite being the tallest peak in 3/4 of the world’s surface area, it’s only about 190th tallest overall… the Himalayas are crazy big. There was also a brief stop at the Mendozan Puente del Inca – an important clarification as it seems that every street corner in Peru is also a Puente Inca – that gave us some incredible views of an old settlement essentially built in a geyser outflow… choices sure were made.

With all this and a little wandering around the enormous Parque General San Martin close to our Airbnb, our time in Argentina came to a close much faster than anyone really expected. It’s been incredible to see the diversity of the country and we’re already thinking of what we want to do next time we make it back here!