By Hilary Larson for TheJewishWeek.comThere was a time when a vacation in Argentina automatically meant Buenos Aires. The country’s capital city — home to tango, Latin America’s biggest Jewish community and a third of the Argentine population — was, for many North Americans, the only place on the tourism radar.
But it didn’t surprise me when a friend recently departed for Argentina, and the capital wasn’t even on her agenda. “I’m going to Mendoza,” she confided, as she scoured L.L. Bean’s website for camping gear. “It’s harvest season. I’m going to tour wineries, go mountain-climbing and stay at a bodega with vineyards and a view of the Andes.”
Indeed, Mendoza — on the country’s far western border — may just be the most sophisticated town in the Andean region. Whereas the Peruvian and Ecuadorean Andes towns tend to be rustic, even indigenous in feel, Mendoza has a distinctly upscale sensibility; the city itself is urbane and elegant, and the surrounding wine country is maturing into a connoisseur’s destination (with affordable prices).
Winery tourism has exploded here over the past decade — due perhaps equally to the rising global popularity of Argentine wines, the exoticism of Mendoza’s natural landscapes and the friendly exchange rate for the Argentine peso.
Mendoza’s myriad wine producers, in turn, have responded with ever-more-enticing offerings for malbec-sipping tourists. In what was once largely an industrial outpost, you could now easily fill a week with...Read Full Article
