By Reed Whiting
I got into Mendoza around 730 on sat. and got a cab to go and meet with Duffy Crane, who I was staying with. After dropping all of my stuff off at her apartment, we headed directly for the wine tasting room to show me around. A little background on Duffy. She works for and is a partner in a start up company called the vines of Mendoza. They have a very nice wine tasting room in Mendoza where tourist come and do flights of the best wine Argentina has to offer and they are in the process of building a customer base from the US that they ship bottle back to on a quarterly basis. They have only been at it for 7 months and they already have over 270 people in the wine club. They also have a real estate development going in where they actually sell the vineyards for around 40-60K per acre with all of the infrastructure in place including the panted grapes. Comparably speaking in California a similar piece of land that has this climate for growing grapes would be over 500K per acre. They ave already sold out of there first round of sales and
So we went to the wine tasting room and I did a fight of wine. I really felt like a high class individual with my sandals, long hair and backwards cap for about 10 minutes. Basically I tried 5 different types of wine and got detailed explanations of each one. It was a cool experience even though I'm not really into stuff like that. I did learn that the people who are into this wine stuff are REALLY into this wine stuff. I guess there main wine person can identify a glass of wine in 74 different ways. Unreal.
After that we headed over to there friends house for dinner and then went out on the town. I could tell when I meet Duffy that she was a ball of fire and she was sure encouraging when it came to hitting the town and having a couple cocktails. We sat out on one of the busiest streets for awhile just chatting and people watching when all of the sudden I heard this honking coming from down the street. When I looked to see what it was, I saw this guy standing in the back of a pickup truck completely naked waving his hands in the air and jumping all around while his buddies honked that horn, Ive never heard of or seen anything like this in my life. There must have been over a coupe thousand people in the block I was on looking at this dude. Supposedly this is what you do on the night of your bachelor party down here. I was waiting to see his fiance go by, but that never happened. Not fair at all.
Later we went to what appeared to be a low key bar with some live music. That was until about 200 where they quickly removed every table and chair in the place and all of the sudden the place was jumping with electronic music. Once again there were gorgeous local girls everywhere. Now when I see stuff like this I get frustrated for not attempting to learn Spanish earlier in life. The best way to describe it is like being a young kid in a candy store without any money. Tough life I have huh?
So then on Sunday I slept in til about 12 and took a nice jog around town. This city is way more beautiful
that BA and has trees everywhere. This area of Argentina is high desert and they ave a aqueduct system throughout the whole city keeping all of these trees alive. Its a sight to see. After the run we headed to the main park in town, which is bigger than central park in NYC and more beautiful. Had lunch, sat around Adan had a couple beers and then went to a friends to watch the Patriots game. I was so tired from the night before I was almost falling asleep through the whole game.
Most of the people we have hung out with in Mendoza are all a part of the vines of Mendoza. Its been really interesting to talk with Duffy about the company and what kinds of issues the start up is going through. It kind of makes me a little jealous as I long for an idea or concept to get a business like this going some day. All of the people that work there are great and all seem to really love it down here. After spending a couple days I can see why.
