By Dominick A. Merle for NapaValleyRegister.comOnce a year, this laid-back city at the foot of the Andes sets aside the siesta, cerveza and empanada and rolls out the red carpet for its Masters of Food and Wine festival.
Celebrity chefs and wine connoisseurs from around the world gather at the luxurious Park Hyatt Hotel, and for the next four days it’s non-stop sipping, tasting and touring the surrounding bodegas (wineries).
“There’s a lot happening in our part of the world,” said Andres Rosberg, president of the Argentina Sommeliers Assn. “We don’t like to shout about it, but you can hear it through the grapevine,” he added with a wink.
The Park Hyatt chain sponsors four of these events yearly, the others in Zurich, Shanghai and Washington, D.C. But Mendoza, a city of about 1.5-million residents in midwestern Argentina, is its wine superstar.
There are almost 1,000 bodegas throughout Mendoza province. It is by far the most important wine center in South America and has vaulted Argentina into the fifth largest wine producing nation in the world.
Some of the bodegas we visited had main houses resembling mini-castles or palaces, others had a more pastoral and homey look, and one (Cheval des Andes) had a polo field in the middle of the vineyard (polo is almost as popular as vino down here).
As about 70 percent of Argentines can trace their heritage to...Read Full Article
