Mendoza & Wine Country

Mendoza is a green city built on purpose in a desert: after the earthquake of 1861 flattened it, the survivors redrew it with wide streets, five plazas and — the stroke of genius — an acequia, an open irrigation channel, along every sidewalk, so that sycamores could shade the whole grid. The water comes from the Andes, which stand at the end of the streets as a wall higher than any other outside Asia; Aconcagua, 6,961 metres, watches from the pass. The vines drink from the same channels, and the Malbec that arrived from France in 1853 found here the altitude and the sun that made it Argentina's own.

The traveller walks the plazas and the Parque General San Martín up to the Cerro de la Gloria, where the monument to the Army of the Andes looks back at the mountains it crossed; rides a bicycle between the old bodegas of Maipú; lunches long in Luján de Cuyo, the cradle of the Malbec; climbs by van to the Valle de Uco, where the newest labels grow at fifteen hundred metres against the snow; and gives one day to Route 7 — Uspallata, Puente del Inca, the pass to Chile — for the mountain itself.

The Guide's practical counsel: the siesta is real — the city closes from one to five and reopens for a very late dinner —; wineries want reservations, and the good ones want them days ahead in harvest season; the Vendimia festival, the first weekend of March, fills every bed in the province; the Zonda, a hot dry wind from the mountains, blows in spring and puts everyone in a mood; and the sun at eight hundred metres is stronger than it feels, in the vines as on the plaza.