We love Mendoza (nos gusta Mendoza!)

Our first full day in Mendoza (yesterday) started with everyone feeling very cranky at breakfast. The drive from BA had been too long, we´d had too little food and had snarfed down bad pasta and pizza at 11 pm when we got to town, there had been some complications with the hotel...and personally, I was questioning the decision to drive on to Chile in two short days since I was really, really tired of the Toshota Corosha already.

Crabbily, we agreed to go our separate ways for a couple of hours, everyone ready to chew off their own foot to get a little alone time.

Two hours later, each of us bounded back into the hotel lobby saying ¨I love this town!!" Two hours exploring Mendoza had cleared the black clouds from everyone´s heads. It´s small, it´s quaint, it has lovely little public squares and a nice warm temperature. "I am so happy!" bubbled Megan, over and over. She had found a nice food market with fresh produce and good food, which could not be more welcome after our miserable driving day deprived of nourishment. She returned bearing soy snack bars, almonds, some bread, a fabulously fresh avacado, and a salami for Brian.

So we headed off together to the information office (whence I wrote yesterday´s blogs), and arranged a private winery tour. There are a couple hundred wineries in the Mendoza area. It´s a desert, but can be irrigated from the many rivers and streams coming out of the Andes. After a quick lunch, a van arrived at the information booth with our guide. Anna is a native Mendozan whose family is in the wine business, and who recently finished law school. Fluent in English (having attended an English high school, like Manuela at the Mexican restaurant in BA), Anna does wine tours, as well as rock-climbing excursions, for Americans and Europeans while she sits for the various exams that she´s required to take. She wants to become the lawyer for the family business.

The first winery we visited was a small one that still does things both organically and "the traditional way." No stainless steel fermentation tanks, no additives or chemical pesticides on the grapes. Anna´s father also produces his wine here, through a business arrangement with the owner. The guide from the winery gave us a tour and a very excellent explanation of how to look at and taste wine. The Mendoza area of Argentina is particularly known for red wines made from the Malbec grape. The wines we tasted were excellent, and we left with a bottle of their 1997 Malbec, a gold-medal winner that year at the Montreal wine festival - in other words, the best Malbec in the world that year.

Outside the winery were olive groves as well as a grove of almond trees, which were in the midst of harvest by men with long sticks, banging the branches so the ripe nuts would fall to the ground. Numerous happy dogs lounged nearby, occasionally sauntering over to eat an almond or two.

The second winery that Anna had picked was a contrast - a very large winery that does everything "state of the art." What made it interesting, in addition to the contrast, was the presence of a wine museum, with various squeezing, squashing, separating and holding implements from nearly 200 years of wine-making. The guide worked in Spanish and English, delivering both at blazing speed, and the wines did not impress us as much in part because we hadn´t learned anything about them. At the first winery, the guide had told us about each wine in detail, like describing the special personality and unique attributes of each child.

Meanwhile, a violent storm had rolled in, the raindrops creating a thunderous din on the tin roof and the sky turning pitch black. We were scheduled to see a third winery, but they had lost electricity, so we headed back into the city. As we were driving back along one of the main canals, we realized there had been a flash flood from the storm - the canal´s water was almost to street level, and as it approached a bridge under a large intersection it spewed upwards like a geyser, chocolate-colored and thick and smelling of earth. Neither Anna nor Raoul (the driver) had ever seen anything like it, they said. People and cars had stopped to gawk. Megan got a great short clip of footage using her digital camera.

The next day we would learn that this storm had caused extensive flooding, forcing 400 people to evacuate their homes and killing two people. That´s a pretty big deal in a town of 100,000. For the wineries, the grape harvest is just this close, and speculation on the damage caused by rain, wind and hail was the talk of the morning.

But we didn´t know this yet. We made avacado sandwiches, imploring Anna to share in our bounty since we knew she had skipped lunch to take on our last-minute tour, and we peppered her with questions about life in Argentina and in Mendoza.

Back at the hotel, we decided to share our special bottle of Malbec before dinner. The top (fifth) floor of the hotel has a small breakfast room, with a terrace outside, which struck us as a lovely place to drink our wine under the setting sun, if they´d let us up there. So - being the designated talker in all such complex situations - I asked the front desk clerk as politely as I could: "Please sir, could we drink a bottle of wine up on the terrace?"

His answer exemplified what I love about this country and this town: "But of course!" he replied. "Do you have a bottle of wine, or do you need one?"

As we climbed to the top floor, the electricity went out. We sat on the terrace, drinking our gold-medal-winning Malbec from borrowed glasses, watching the sun set pink and orange over the darkened town and the towering Andes.