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I know that some will consider this a blasphemy, but bear with me.

Mendoza, Argentina is considered semi-desert (it receives only about 240 mm of rain a year) and is situated in a bowl surrounded by mountains, similar to Las Vegas. The city is artificially green like Las Vegas, with every street sporting beautiful lush trees which are watered through irrigation ditches that line every sidewalk. (The street trees and irrigation ditches are pictured below.) We also saw gated communities with cookie-cutter McMansions featuring red-tiled roofs, just as you would find in Las Vegas. And, finally, they have a few casinos in town!! (You will be happy to know that they haven’t seemed to embrace a love of neon, however.)

The intense agriculture that occurs in this arid region is entirely due to irrigation from local rivers since the surrounding area exists in the rain shadow of the Andes mountains and would not normally support much farming.

In fact, it is this ability to control vine water consumption along with the warm days and cold nights during the ripening season that allows growers to produce such flavorful grapes for wine production.

We only took one tour of a winery while in Mendoza, and boy was it memorable!

We chose to visit a very small boutique winery owned by Carmelo Patti (he is a local celebrity). His small one-man winery is usually mobbed with tourists, so we were lucky to have him all to ourselves because it was late in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve.

Carmelo’s grandfather made wine for the family in Siciliy, and his father did the same when they moved to Mendoza, Argentina. Carmelo went into the trade professionally and has been a winemaker for some 47 years, in one fashion or another.

As we were deep in the warehouse with Mr. Patti, a tremendously powerful thunderstorm hit and due to a clogged gutter, Mr. Patti’s tasting room began to flood badly. It was raining from the ceiling and pouring out the door like a raging stream. His paperwork and memorabilia were sopping, his giant ancient leather guestbook was soaked, the power went out, and the place was trashed.

Carmelo climbed a rickety ladder to the roof to unclog the gutter. We dropped everything and went into action. The girls worked the squeegees in the tasting room with Ian. Tom and I rescued paperwork, set it out to dry, and began blotting the ancient book. It was crazy.

Not surprisingly, the Zs thought it was the coolest wine tour ever!

We spent about 9 hours in Córdoba, Argentina between Christmas and New Year’s (it was a Saturday). The city was deserted, and as a result, ’twas a wee bit creepy.

Our first stop was one of the larger plazas in the city, Plaza San Martin, the site of the Iglesia Catedral (the back of which is pictured here). We expected the plaza to be a vibrant meeting place for the city’s residents. Unfortunately, it was filled mostly with the three “Ps”: police, pick pockets, and prostitutes.

Córdoba has some excellent examples of 17th and 18th century architecture, which are easily walkable to view in a day. Unfortunately for us, all of the sites were closed. After what we dubbed our “sightseeing death march in the sun,” we gave up and spent the next 7 hours in a cafe eating, surfing, and synchronizing a multi-computer viewing of War Games (all of us using headphones).