Farmstead Cheeses and Wines: Jeff’s Blog

If you had told me that I was going to spend 24 hours on a cramped bus in order to taste wines for two hours and have a dinner with a charming winemaking family, I’d have thought you were nutso, but I did, and I don’t.

The next morning, we met at 7AM for the 12 hour drive to the bustling city of Neuquén, in the northern part of Patagonia. The trip was non-eventful - hundreds of miles of bleak scrub, punctuated by tire stores, unclean bathrooms, bumpy roads, more bleak scrub, a few goats, and curio shops.

I was able to add to my store of wacky photographs about half way through the trip at a gas station that seemed to specialize in weirdly nostalgic ceramic figurines with religious, slightly offensive Africana, or Argentinian iconic images.

Scary and fascinating to be sure, I had to be dragged away from the shop to get back on the bus. (It seems that I’ve found a plethora of wacky ceramic figurines on my wine trips - Spain, South Africa and Argentina- someday I’ll have to publish a book of wacky ceramic figurine photos! What a great gift idea).

We arrived in Neuquén City at around 7:00 p.m., and it seemed that every 14 year old on the planet was lining the streets. Seriously, there must have been thousands of them.

This region of Argentina is very wealthy - as it’s the source of all of the country’s energy - electricity and oil. The city is bustling with new construction, high end shops, new cars and well-dressed citizenry. I realized that by contrast Mendoza is a bit depressed, and hasn’t quite recovered from the economic woes that hit the country in 2002.

I unpacked and wandered the streets for an hour before meeting up with colleagues in a wine bar to sample some Patagonian Pinot.

Patagonia - especially the area around Neuquén - is a new hot wine region, specializing in Malbec, Cab, and Pinot. The soils are volcanic, the climate is harsh, with nearly constant winds (good for organic farming, as bugs don’t like strong wind and you can farm without chemicals), and a strong diurnal temperature variation (grapes that are stressed between hot and cold tend to have more vigor and flavor).

This is a young wine region - not more than ten wineries - and Fran Kysela has gotten in on the ground floor with arguably the best winery in the region, NQN.

We were met at the hotel by some winery representatives, who accompanied us to a local casino restaurant for another well-prepared meal of Argentine cuisine (meat) and wine.
The conversations were lively, cross-cultural and fun, and we left around midnight for the hotel.

In the morning, we piled back into the busses for a short drive out of town to tour the state of the art winery for a short tour, extended tasting and adasa (more meat!!)

The wines were lovely and showed great promise for the winery and the region. I was particulary impressed by the Seleccion wines - inky Malbec and a lovely blend of Cab, Malbec and Mer-LOTT.

Then it was goodbye NQN and a 12 hour ride back to the hotel. Thank god I brought a bunch of old film noir and western DVDs, so we were able to pass the time watching Ida Lupino, Eddie Albert, Ricardo Montalban and Robert Ryan.