Mendoza Travel Guide

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Foreign Grocery Friday: The Yerba Mate of Argentina

March 30, 2012 at 10:54 AM | by | Comment (1)

When we travel, one of our favorite things to do is to pop into a local grocery store and check out the food products and candies we'd never find anywhere else. So we're trying out this new feature, Foreign Grocery Friday, where each week we'll feature some of our (and your) favorite overseas treats. Got a recommendation? Let us know!

Take the teabag out. Throw it away. Travel to Argentina and have some real Yerba Mate. Forget that you ever drank Yerba Mate using a stepped teabag.

While mate is popular all around South America—in Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Peru and Bolivia especially—we're concerning ourselves with mate in Argentina, which is where we recently went crazy for the stuff and where drinking it is a social thing, but even more frequent than having tea in the UK or coffee in San Francisco. You'll see people clutching their gourds everywhere.

Mate is a type of shrub holly, and yerba are its leaves. The tea, a dried loose mix of the shriveled leaves and little sticks, has a very specific preparation that involves its own specific instruments: a guampa/mate (hollowed out drinking gourd) and a bombilla (metal straining straw).

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Photographing the Vintage Cars of Mendoza, Argentina (in Hipstamatic)

February 29, 2012 at 2:13 PM | by | Comment (1)

If you want to talk about cities and their signature characteristics (and we obviously do), then you could say that NYC has its bodegas and delis, Las Vegas has its flashy signage, Moscow has its onion domes and Santiago—as we've already seen—has its vibrant street art. But Mendoza, Argentina?

Wineries, right? Wrong. The wineries of Mendoza are, for the most part, outside Mendoza in the agrarian outskirts. Instead, in the proper city center, we instead found streets littered with brightly painted vintage cars—Renaults, Peugeots, Fiats and Fords and Dodges from the 1950s through late 1970s, all surviving thanks to the arid environment.

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Foreign Grocery Friday: The Lomito Sandwiches of Argentina

February 24, 2012 at 4:08 PM | by | Comments (0)

When we travel, one of our favorite things to do is to pop into a local grocery store and check out the food products and candies we'd never find anywhere else. So we're trying out this new feature, Foreign Grocery Friday, where each week we'll feature some of our (and your) favorite overseas treats. Got a recommendation? Let us know!

Who's up for a cheesesteak...Argentinian style? All around this South American country, at almost any time of the day (but yeah, mainly lunch), people of all walks are biting into big lomitos. The lomito sandwich is a beauty to behold for the meat lover; it consists of juicy tenderloin steak plus some combination of the following: tomato, lettuce, fried egg, spicy mayo, mustard, cheese, and maybe grilled peppers.

It's typically oozy, cut in half, and large enough to satisfy two small appetites. In other words, it's awesome.

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OMG. McDonalds Has Wine on the Menu in South America

February 21, 2012 at 1:26 PM | by | Comments (0)

Never thought we'd ever, ever say this, but McDonalds serves wine...good wine. Don't rush out to the drive-thru just yet, however; the bottle is only available as part of a value meal in the Argentine wine capital of Mendoza.

Billed as the "Sabores Mendocinos" menu, the meal includes a double-patty burger of Angus beef, two meat empanadas, and a 187mL (glass!) bottle of local Malbec produced by Bodega Santa Julia. Want to sample it? "Sabores Mendocinos" will cost you 47.00 Argentinean pesos, or $10.80 USD.

It's definitely not the most expensive McDonalds item we've ever seen—the $17 "1955 burger" meal of Norway holds that honor—but it definitely ranks up there in both priciness and weirdness.

So, what does it taste like? We did the dirty work of drinking the McDonalds wine to find out...

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FAUX SNOW FIGHT! Celebrating Carnaval in Mendoza, Argentina

February 21, 2012 at 10:42 AM | by | Comments (0)

It may be Mardi Gras/Carnaval today, but the party gets started much earlier in some countries. Take Argentina for example, where the celebrations are usually several days full of dancing, music, and...fake snow fights? Yep, totally true, and actually true for other South American countries as well, where aerosol cans of foam make the party.

Last night in Mendoza, we headed into the Parque General San Martín for some lomos (sandwiches) and some getting seriously soaked with nieve artificial (fake snow), not to mention the full water bottles and water balloons being tossed with abandon by little kids and teenagers, further up by all the cheering and taunting that is just as much a part of the experience as the foam.

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Blessing the Wine in Mendoza

February 25, 2009 at 3:31 PM | by | Comments (0)

As the Northern Hemisphere prepares for the arrival of spring, parts Southern await the harvest. The vines just starting to bud here are ripe for the picking in Argentina, where the annual Fiesta Nacional de la Vendimia in Mendoza celebrates those all-important first fruits.

Anytime is a good time to visit Mendoza's back-country wineries; it's basically the Napa Valley of South America. But during the fiesta nacional, which begins Saturday, the vines are blessed in the Benedicion de las frutas, and a queen of the vines is elected from among the local lovelies. And don't miss the Carrusel Vendimial, a combination dance and parade that fills the streets on March 7.

Oh yeah, and if you don't like all that pageantry, there's also plenty of wine available. We hear.

Related Stories:
· Fiesta Nacional de la Vendimia schedule [Mendoza.gov.ar]
· Active Travel: Horsing Around on Beautiful Back Roads [Jaunted]
· Wine Travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: Dr Vino]

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