After a long winter, it always nourishes the soul to soak up spring in public gardens as they begin their season-long parade of blossoms. So, last Thursday, I paid a short visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario. It’s also in Hamilton, the neighbouring city – which is what happens when you have discrete properties spanning the municipal boundary along Plains Road. There was a lovely ‘Gorgeous’ crabapple attracting bees in front of the visitor centre.
Tulips (I think that spectacular orange one is ‘Daydream’) were in full flower along the walkway.
The raised gardens here attract lots of attention, given that they’re at eye level.
I loved this combination: yellow-flowered cushion spurge (Euphorbia polychroma) with ‘Blue Ensign’ lungwort (Pulmonaria) and eastern shooting star (Dodecatheon meadia) in front.
Then I arrived at what used to be called the Hendrie Rose Garden and is now the Centennial Rose Garden within Hendrie Park, which is the new name encompassing all the gardens at this location. The roses will begin in June, of course. I must say, I miss the old vine pergolas with the clematis and pleached trees overhead, but I’m sure these black metal gazebos will stand the test of time. And from the photos I’ve seen online, this new incarnation is going to be more inspiring to gardeners who want to know how to design with low-maintenance roses in their own gardens, i.e. using companion plants rather than seeing the shrubs all alone in a “rose zoo”.
As we walked along the edge of the forest of the Grindstone Creek Valley, I saw native redbuds (Cercis canadensis) with their branches lined in tiny pink flowers.
A little flash of yellow alerted me to a male goldfinch in an oak tree. Lots of birders come here with their long lenses!
A horse-chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) was just opening its first flowers, left, below. Did you know that this European tree has a fascinating reproductive strategy? Bees can see yellow, but not red, so the tree features a little yellow splotch on its newest flowers, the ones containing fresh nectar and pollen. As the flowers age, they turn orange, then red (right). Red is not a colour bees can detect, so they don’t bother with the old “used” flowers any more.
The Scented Garden was awash in fragrant daffodils (no labels, alas), while magnolias and perfumed Koreanspice viburnum (V. carlesii) were offering their olfactory best in the distance.
A favourite spot for me is the Helen M. Kippax Wild Plants Garden. I like its naturalistic approach to life and pollinators.
Mayapples were just coming into flower beside brilliant Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica)…..
….. which were attracting queen bees to the nectar-rich flowers, like the one below.
Our native common blue violet (Viola sororia) was putting on a pretty show.
How thrilling to see a young American chestnut (Castanea dentata), in a cage here to protect the tender shoots from voracious rabbits. Once a major eastern deciduous forest component (thought to have comprised 25-30% of hardwoods), this now endangered species suffered a massive decline because of chestnut blight, which is estimated to have killed between 3-4 billion trees in Eastern North America between 1904, when the disease was discovered, and the 1950s. Currently, the Canadian Chestnut Council is working to reintroduce trees bred to have better resistance to the blight.
The familiar flowers of wild geranium (Geranium maculatum) lit up a corner.
American red elderberry (Sambucus pubens) was in flower at the top of the Grindstone Creek Valley.
There was an informative and artful display set up to explain the role of solitary bees. I didn’t see any in residence, but perhaps it’s still early in the season.
Native bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) was showing off its catkin flowers.
The pond featured an interesting sculpture and a good interpetive sign explaining earth’s water cycle.
Most of the gardens were still waking up. In the Medicinal Plants Garden…….
…. the only plant in bloom was pink lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria majalis var. rosea). Evidently, in careful doses, the root, which contains convallatoxin, has been used for cardiac arrhythmias and other heart issues. (The berries, however, are highly poisonous.)
Our next stop was a short drive down Plains Road to The Arboretum to see the RBG’s big lilac collection of over 700 species and cultivars. I wanted to see the early-blooming lilacs on the Kitsy Evans Lilac Walk…..
…. including the common lilac (Syringa vulgaris) which has given rise to so many cultivars over the past century.
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The Hyacinthifloras were in flower, given the early season……
….. and renowned Manitoba breeder Dr. Frank Skinner’s 1966 introduction, the compact, pink-flowered S. x hyacinthiflora ‘Maiden’s Blush’ (S. oblata, ssp. dilatata x S. vulgaris) was perfuming the path. It’s a favourite of many lilac fans.
I headed down the slope of the Katie Osborne Lilac Garden to see what other early lilacs were in bloom.
There is now a path along the bottom of the Dell, which makes walking through easier……
…. but I must say that given that the Royal Botanical Gardens was once the International Cultivar Registration Authority (ICRA) for lilacs and has such a deep collection, I was disappointed in the attention being paid to the lilacs on the steep south slope. Pruning has been let go here and elsewhere, which has allowed many lilac shrubs to grow too tall. In some places, lilacs have died and there are now hazardous depressions where people who want to climb the hill like mountain goats can twist ankles or worse. I have been many times to the RBG at lilac time, and I’ve written about lilacs and Hyacinthifloras and hybridizer Frank Skinner in particular – see my Canadian Gardening 2008 story, below. In one memorable interview with the RBG’s former lilac specialist Charles Holetich in the mid-90s when I was writing my weekly newspaper column for the Toronto Sun, he said he was a “strong believer that lilacs should be kept pruned at between 6-9 feet”.
I understand the difficulties associated with a steep slope (and limited staffing), but it seems to be me that some of these important lilacs, below, could easily be transplanted to the empty, flat lawn at the top on the north side of the Dell, where they could be maintained as they should be.
As we headed out of the Arboretum, I enjoyed this lovely ‘Midnight’ chokecherry (Prunus virginiana), and gazed beyond it to the big, flat lawn where those ignored lilacs might enjoy a new lease on life.
I attended the opening in 2016 (following a 4-year renovation of the 1929 garden) but the plantings have matured in three years. While it was primarily a spring display garden in its previous life, it had been re-imagined courtesy of Janet Rosenberg & Studio as a four-season garden featuring many more shrubs and a big palette of perennials. This was the view from the top.
Nearby was a fragrant ‘Heaven Scent’ magnolia (M. liliiflora x M. veitchii).
I did find some familiar little paths on the edge of the valley slope, where I could look through flowering almond (Prunus triloba ‘Multiplex’)…..
….. to old plantings of basket-of-gold (Aurinia saxatilis) still going strong decades later…
….. and some beautiful views down to the valley through fragrant Viburnum x carlcephalum ‘Cayuga’.
But it was down on the valley floor where you get the big picture, over a sleek, sinuous water feature up towards the new visitor centre, intended to attract not just garden-lovers but year-round restaurant diners and wedding and special event revenue as well.
The water feature extends around in front of the old 1962 teahouse, which is now called the Garden House.
A beautiful bridge spans the water, which will host water lilies in summer.
Along the main garden path which takes visitors on a gentle (wheelchair-accessible) ascent back to the Visitor Centre, only a few spring perennials were in bloom.
Retracing my steps, I climbed a path at the far end of the rock garden, past a lovely Korean maple (Acer pseudosieboldianum) …….
…… and a pretty little waterfall.
There were pale fritillaries (Fritillaria pallida) peeking out from ostrich ferns….
…. and at the top of the stone steps, the reward of a ‘Valentine’ bleeding heart in flower.
We walked through the late blossoms of ‘Kanzan’ Japanese cherries in the RBG’s cherry collection to return to our car.
After a long winter, it was a joy to walk among cherry blossoms, daffodils, scented lilacs and viburnums in yet another spring at the Royal Botanical Gardens.
It’s a cool spring here in Toronto, and things are late to flower; when they do, they hold on for a long time. My tulips have just started opening, but ten days ago I was lucky enough to tiptoe through gazillions of gorgeous tulips at the Abbotsford Tulip Festival in the Fraser Valley, about 73 kilometres (43 miles) from Vancouver, B.C. I was there visiting my west coast family and my sister Bonnie, right, was kind enough to take me to the festival. So… natch… we asked a perfect stranger to take our picture.
Then we started touring. This is the patch where visitors are allowed to pick their own tulip stems to buy to take home. Isn’t it fun?
People were very happy to be capturing a little of this floral joy.
And the cameras! From pros with tripods, to SLRs around necks, to every kind of cellphone camera, the shutterbugs were there.
Tulips have a long period of flowering, from the Single Early types and botanical tulips to the Single Late varieties. In a cool spring, tulips might flower for six weeks, but when temperatures warm up, so does the speed with which the tulips flower and fade. Fortunately for me our visit was perfectly timed at pleasant (not warm) temperatures for maximum bloom! And best of all, it was the kind of high overcast sky that I love for photography (and thanks to my sis for the photo below).
As for photography tips (and almost all of mine were made with my Samsung S8 cellphone), here are two images I made from my vantage point above. I think most people would agree that this one…..
….. is not as visually powerful as the one below. Why is that? While the one above captures the little mountains in the background and has a nice sense of vanishing point perspective, it’s a bit too easy on the eyes. The one below, by placing the angle of the tulip rows on the oblique and cutting out the far landscape but leaving the horizon showing, focuses attention on the spectacular geometry of the fields and the brilliant colour combinations of the tulips. That double magenta, by the way, is ‘Margarita’.
I caught Bonnie photographing the rose-flushed, light-pink Triumph tulip ‘Rosalie’…..
…. which is a lovely soft shade to use with mauves and lilacs.
One of my favourite tulips is the dramatic Single Late ‘Queen of Night’. I grow this one myself…..
….. and I liked the way it had cheekily intruded into this hot pink and orange mix. Hello!!
Speaking of intruders, I think most of us secretly love it when a solid block of single-colour tulips is visited by an interloper – the tulip version of photo-bombing. This is the Single Late yellow ‘La Courtine’ in a bed of the magenta-pink Triumph ‘Milka’.
Tulip interiors like those of ‘Milka’ are fun to photograph. Defined as “perennial herbaceous bulbiferous geophytes” (i.e. they come back every year, they’re herbs not shrubs, they grow from bulbs, and they have perennating, underground storage organs), tulips are members of the Lily Family, Liliaceae.
Tulips are native to parts of southern Europe and Central Asia (Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and the other “stan”countries) and the name is believed to derive from the Persian word for turban, tuliband. Indeed, tulips were an essential part of the court of the Ottoman Empire, as this story from Amsterdam’s Tulip Museum recalls.
The Dutch, of course, have cornered the market in tulip-breeding. When we were in the Netherlands in 1998, we loved driving through the tulip fields near Lisse.
Those blocks of vibrant colour are so tantalizing. In 1885, Impressionist painter Claude Monet travelled in the Netherlands and painted The Tulip Fields and Rijnsberg Windmill.
As well, you can see tulips planted in beautiful combinations at spectacular Keukenhhof Gardens, which is the exhibition garden for numerous Dutch bulb-growers.
Here in Canada, I’ve been to the Ottawa Tulip Festival, which I wrote about in a previous blog.
But back to the Abbotsford Tulip Festival, here are some beautifully grown modern tulip bulbs. This is ‘Camargue’, a pink-streaked sport of the tulip ‘Menton’. It starts out pale yellow and ages to ivory-white.
‘Caravelle’ is a stunning tulip, a Single Late variety with beetroot-purple flowers. It was used in several mixed beds here at the festival as well.
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‘Happy Generation’, below, may look familiar to some. It was branded as a Limited Edition ‘Canada 150’ tulip during our country’s sesquicentennial in 2017, since it looks like the flame that burns at our parliament buildings in Ottawa.
I grow ‘Dordogne’ in my own garden – I love the gold and salmon tones in this tulip.
‘Flaming Parrot’ is a fine-feathered bird (as are all the Parrot tulips). It starts out with yellow in the colour mix and then fades to creamy-white and red.
It’s also fun to look into this one.
And here it is in a beautiful mixture at the Abbotsford Tulip Festival.
‘Spring Green’, below, is a Viridiflora Tulip. Underneath it is a lovely tulip I grow in my garden…..
….. the deep-red 1942 Parrot Tulip ‘Rococo’.
Some combinations are unusual but work well, like the dark-mauve Fringed Tulip ‘Louvre’ with the salmon-flushed golden-yellow Darwin Hybrid Tulip ‘World Peace’.
‘Denmark’ is a strong, bicolour Triumph.
Pink and white make a pretty pairing – don’t know the names of these two.
Okay, I think we’ve taken the weird double tulip thing far enough. I don’t care if they look like sundaes and someone named them ‘Ice Cream’ – please make this trend stop!
At the far end of the tulip fields, there was a windmill. Of course! And I had to pose.
There was also a basket, which we decided must be suggestive of a hot air balloon….? Or maybe bulb growers in the Netherlands carry bulbs in baskets? Anyway, we posed it that, too!
What fun people were having with their selfie sticks and walking up and down the paths with kids and grandparents.
Everyone was posing for the perfect tulips-and-me shot!
Wisely, the festival folks made it easy to get online publicity….. #colourinthecountry. And they have an online store too where you can order favourites.
But it was now time to go. I did love the brilliant displays with all their colourful geometry and such beautifully grown tulips, but……
…. as a gardener, I prefer to grow them not in soldier-like rows but mixed in with daffodils, small bulbs like Anemone blanda, crocuses, grape hyacinths (Muscari sp.), all set in a matrix of emerging perennials that will carry the garden throughout summer into autumn. And colour-wise, I do love a tulip party, thanks to my own bulb supplier pal Caroline de Vries.
In my garden, the tulip season begins with Darwin Hybrids and finishes with the Single Late tulips in a symphony of light-purple Camassia leichtlinii and Fothergilla gardenii. And that should all be happening any day now, if spring in Toronto would just warm up!
The Andes, Uspallata Pass between Chile and Argentina – My only exposure to the Andes prior to crossing them on our wine tour was reading the book ‘Alive’ by Piers Paul Read, about the 1972 Uruquayan Air Force plane crash on a glacier and amazing survival of sixteen of the passengers, after 72 days (thanks to necessary cannibalism). So the mountain range had always seemed spooky to me. But I needn’t have worried, because our drivers knew the road and we climbed the famous serpentine ascent, stopping near the top to take a shot of where we’d been.
In winter – our summer – when the Portillo ski resort is open, the mountains are covered in deep snow and avalanche danger is real, so vulnerable sections of the highway pass through avalanche tunnels…..
….. like this.
We stopped to photograph the highest peak in Latin America, Aconcagua (6,960 metres – 22,841 ft), which is entirely in Argentina.
The Chile-Argentina customs hall (Complejo Fronterizo los Libertadores) is a little beyond the actual border in a giant hangar at an elevation of about 3800 metres (12,467 feet). Everyone must disembark and have passports stamped while the bus is thoroughly inspected.
While we waited outside for the bus to clear customs, I gazed around at the amazing formations on the mountains.
How I wished I had a geologist at my side on that journey over the Andes. Pretty sure this is sedimentary rock, but there were dark black volcanic rocks in places too. The Andes – or the Cordillera de los Andes – are quite young, geologically speaking, just 45 million years, compared to parts of eastern Argentina where the rocks of the Rio de la Plata Craton exceed 2 billion years. The longest mountain chain in the world, they extend 7,000 kilometres (4,300 miles) from Venezuela to the bottom of Argentina. The Andes sit on the Pacific Ring of Fire, with myriad volcanoes throughout the region. The mountain range was formed tectonically as the Nazca Plate and a portion of the Antarctic Plate are sliding beneath the South American Plate. It is this action that results in earthquakes and volcanoes.
Different colours indicate different mineralization and ages of the rock.
We made a stop not far down the highway at La Puente del Incas, the Bridge of the Incas. The amazing colours here come from the minerals in the hot springs. Set into the rock, you can also see the ruins of a thermal spa that operated here from 1905 to August 1965, when an avalanche and debris destroyed the spa hotel in the distance. According to Wikipedia: “Both glaciers and the hot springs were involved in the formation of the arch. During an ice age, glaciers would have expanded down throughout the entire valley; then, at the end of the ice age when the Earth began to warm up again, the retreating ice would have left behind massive piles of eroded debris. The water that flows from the hot springs is extremely rich in mineral content, to the point that it has been known to petrify small objects in a layer of minerals. Similarly, the piles of debris left by the glaciers were encrusted over time into a single solid mass. Finally, during a period where the climate was extremely wet, a powerful river formed in the valley. It cut a channel through the lower, least encrusted layers of debris, which gradually eroded into the large opening of the arch.”
Just beyond, you can see the little chapel, La Capilla de las Nieves, built in 1929. It survived the avalanche. Beyond that are the ruins of the spa hotel.
I’ll let a young Charles Darwin have the last word on the Bridge of the Incas, from his journal entries in ‘Voyage of the Beagle’. The Beagle was a British ship mapping the coast of South America and Darwin was a young naturalist on board. When the ship was at port, he travelled into the countryside, often on horseback. This was his pithy assessment of the bridge, which was accompanied by a sketch complete with vaqueros on horseback.
April 4th 1835 – “From the Rio de las Vacas to the Puente del Incas, half a day’s journey. As there was pasture for the mules, and geology for me, we bivouacked here for the night. When one hears of a natural Bridge, one pictures to oneself some deep and narrow ravine, across which a bold mass of rock has fallen; or a great arch hollowed out like the vault of a cavern. Instead of this, the Incas Bridge consists of a crust of stratified shingle cemented together by the deposits of the neighbouring hot springs. It appears as if the stream had scooped out a channel on one side, leaving an overhanging ledge, which was met by earth and stones falling down from the opposite cliff. Certainly an oblique junction, as would happen in such a case, was very distinct on one side. The Bridge of the Incas is by no means worthy of the great monarchs whose name it bears.”
We continued down the Argentine side past craggy peaks with talus slopes from erosion….
…. and others showing limestone strata in sandstone……
…. before arriving in a lovely valley where the Rio Mendoza flowed by in a summer trickle.
Looking up, I could see black lava outcrops in places.
From the rolling hills of the valley, the view of the cordillera was spectacular.
Soon we were near the little town of Uspallata with obvious signs of civilization.
After lunch in Uspallata, we continued on in a verdant valley along the Rio Mendoza. I believe they call these smaller mountains the pre-Cordillera.
I was sorry to leave the Andes foothills behind, but they would be in our view for the next week.
As we drove into Mendoza, we passed the turquoise-blue waters of the Potrerillos Dam.
Bodega Salentein, Uco Valley, Mendoza, Argentina – After arriving at our hotel in the Uco Valley for the next two nights, Posada Salentein, we headed out on the Salentein family’s large estate to visit their winery. Salentein is a castle in the Netherlands owned by the Pon family who made their wealth in the automobile business. In 1992 when newly-retired Mijndert Pon arrived in Argentina on a whim following a boating accident in the Panama canal (you must read this story on how this event triggered development of the wine industry in Mendoza’s Uco Valley) he purchased a farm followed eventually by other farms to create a tract of land roughly 30 kilometres long and 4 kilometres wide. Today, Salentein features 850 hectares of grapes and 1100 hectares of almonds and walnuts..
We toured the winery and looked down on the cellar, which doubles as an amphitheatre for concerts. They keep the concert length and audience to a minimum, so as not to raise the humidity and temperature levels in the cellar too much.
There is a complex mix of art and science to winemaking. It begins in the field with the choice of specific varietals for the climate and the terroir. How the grapes are then grown and harvested varies each year according to the vagaries of weather. In the winery, the grapes are fermented and aged according to the winemaker’s instructions – and this also varies year to year, according to each season’s expression. But behind each winemaker (or team of winemakers in the bigger wineries), there are numerous technicians who regularly analyze the wine at every stage, carefully noting the readings so each year’s harvest has its own paper trail from vineyard to bottle.
As always, we had a very good tasting.
Leaving Salentein’s reception centre, I was sorry I didn’t have more time to photograph the stunning landscape in front.
Early the next morning on the way to breakfast, I heard voices in the nearby vineyard and watched pickers harvesting the grapes. Since grapes must be picked cool, this takes place from first light and lasts only hours, just until the sun begins to warm the air.
After breakfast as we drove out to our first winery of the day, we saw the big mechanical harvester dumping Salentein grapes into waiting bins.
Zuccardi Piedra Infinita, Altamira, Uco Valley, Mendoza, Argentina – We drove south to La Consulta in the Altamira region to visit Zuccardi’s beautiful, award-winning winery. From the road, we knew we were in for an architectural treat.
Conceived of by third-generation winemaker/owner Sebastián Zuccardi and designed by Tom Hughes, Fernando Raganato and Eugenia Mora and opened in 2016, it features an entrance landscape of silver-leaved native plants that perfectly compliment the stone walls and silvery, egg-shaped dome of the building.
Here we look back along the stone entrance walkway that doubles as a bridge over water.
Before touring the winery, we were taken out to the vineyard since more than any other winery on our two-week tour, Zuccardi Piedra Infinita and Sebastián Zuccardi have zeroed in exhaustively on terroir. Not only were we shown the extensive topographic polygonal mapping that has occurred at this place where an ancient river once flowed, leaving behind a variety of soils: some alluvial (river rock), some colluvial (rock eroded from nearby hills and mountains), some silty, some calcareous, etc…….
……. we were encouraged to visit excavations between adjacent rows that illustrate the mixed terroir. The photo below shows typical alluvial soil; just ten feet away the soil was rock-free.
We also saw how Zuccardi and other Mendoza vineyards use netting at harvest time to prevent damage from hailstones.
Then we were taken indoors…….
…… to look at the cellar, where workers were busy ‘punching down’ the grapes in the egg-shaped cement fermentation tanks.
Back outside, we settled on the patio for our wine tasting. Note that many of the labels celebrate the terroir-mapping theme (Poligonos, Aluvionale) and the traditional use of cement for the fermentation tanks (Concreto).
And I admit I came home with a bottle of Zuccardi’s delicious olive oil. Now all I need to remind me of Argentina are the mountains… and the grapevines…. and the warm sunshine.
Rutini Wines, Uco Valley, Mendoza, Argentina – From the outside, Rutini’s winery looked deceptively small. But that berm, below, ….
….. hides the multiple floors of this operation, which was in the middle of harvest. We were so lucky to see traditional destemming and sorting…..
…. but we also saw the use of a computerized optical sorter. Here’s a little video I made that shows the grape must being pumped to the fermentation tanks, and then the marc or pomace being removed by a very small woman with a big smile!
I watched renowned winemaker Mariano di Paola tasting the juice, just one of a thousand steps in winemaking. A proficient winemaker can tell whether the juice has the correct balance of sugars, acids and flavours; that determines how he or she will proceed with the harvest.
In Rutini’s barrel room….
….. we saw a very special cask made by Sylvain of France from a 360-year old oak tree.
After the winery tour, we visited the tasting room….
….. with its beautiful view of the vineyard and the Andes.
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When I was researching our trip to Chile and Argentina, our friends’ son David German, owner of Fathom Expeditions (he sails to the Antarctic and Arctic, among other destinations and sailed the Shackleton IMAX documentary team to the Antarctic) gave us a few Argentina recommendations. On wine, he had just three words: “Rutini, Rutini, Rutini.” After our tasting at Rutini (and later many meals in Buenos Aires), I would heartily agree.
Finca Decero, Agrelo, Mendoza, Argentina – Decero means “from scratch” in Spanish and that’s the motif of this lovely Remolinos winery, which was created from scratch by Swiss cement billionaire Thomas Schmidheiny.
I spotted this raptor, a chimango caracara (Milvago chimango) on the roof.
We passed a gardener on the way into the winery…..
….. on our tour with winemaker Tomás Hughes, (middle below) who let us taste the 2018 Malbec and Cabernet Sauvignon straight from the barrel.
The tasting here was really quite wonderful. Decero’s mission is to make high quality red wines that are “not overstructured”.
Especially fun was was the 2015 The Owl & The Dust Devil, a blend that has won all kinds of awards (including a Jancis Robinson Wine of the Week and 90+ points from a number of top sommeliers.) Remolinos, as it happens, means a little swirling wind, i.e. a “dust devil”.
It was also my first experience with an “augmented reality” label which, when scanned via the correct app, tells a little story about the wine.
After the tasting, we went outside to stretch our legs. I wandered through the garden with low rock walls arranged sculpturally as the fingers of a hand, symbolizing Decero’s “amano” hand-made philosophy of wine-making. And that isn’t a bad view of the Andes, either.
The lunch we were served at Finca Decero was one of the best meals of our entire trip. It started with a fried empanada of beef flank, pine mushrooms and lemon peel with tomato and plum relish.
Our starter was mouth-watering pork flank with peach emulsion, avocado ice cream and smoked peanuts.
Then came the delicious main course: beef filet with puree of sweet potato and dates, Japanese eggplant, green beans, cherry tomatoes, cream of peas and chorizo.
Next up was a little melon sorbet and “beebrushes”.
For dessert we had white chocolate cake with plum ice cream and a zingy Sriracha and red pepper coulis with raspberries. Outstanding!
After lunch, a few of us walked down the long driveway to wait for our bus to take us to our next hotel in Mendoza City. As I listened to the birds singing, I gazed down at the beautiful rocks arranged along the edge of the gardens flanking the vineyard. These were the Andes, literally parts of the mountains rolled down the slopes to become part of the ancient rivers, landscape and terroir of the vines of the Uco Valley.
Trapiche, Maipú, Mendoza, Argentina – When you’ve been around since 1883, you’re more than a winery, you’re also a museum. That is Trapiche, in the Maipú Valley. Founded by Argentine politician, banker and wine promoter Tiburcio Benegas, El Trapiche was the first winery to bring French vines to Argentina. In fact, Tiburcio Benegas, Silvestre Ochagavia in Chile and Agoston Haraszthy in California are considered to be the fathers of the wine industry in the Americas. Trapiche remained in the Benegas family until the 1970s, when it was sold and later re-sold. Today, it’s owned by a private equity firm and sells its wines into 40 countries.
Some of the winemaking equipment used in the 19th century is on display…..
…. and the original cement tanks are still in use, but with modern fittings and epoxy seals added when the building was renovated in 2006-08.
Train tracks still run up to the winery, from the era when the grapes arrived by rail cars.
There is an old-fashioned feel to the olive grove at Trapiche. Indeed many of the trees are more than a century old.
Close to the winery was the Biodynamic Malbec vineyard.
I seem to have a lot of enthusiastic stars next to my tasting list of Trapiche wines. I loved the 2015 Grand Medalla Cabernet Franc; the 2014 Single Vineyard Malbec; and the 2014 Altimus Merlot.
One favourite was the 2014 Unánime Blend, which represents the unanimous tasting vote of Trapiche’s winemakers. It is 60% Cabernet Sauvignon 25% Malbec and 15% Cabernet Franc, sourced from different valleys in Mendoza.
Trapiche gave us a lovely lunch. After the obligatory empanada appetizer, there was pork shoulder with gremolata….
…… and a delightful dessert of Malbec-poached pears with spun sugar. Then it was back to the hotel until our dinner tasting.
Bodega Lagarde, Luján de Cuyo, Mendoza – We arrived at Lagarde in early evening, and I was impressed with the welcoming garden of agaves and grasses, with vintage farm equipment.
Lagarde was established in 1897, but has been in the Pescarmona family for 50 years. The colonial house is from the 19th century. Irrigation comes straight from the Andes, in the form of canals. This use of Andean meltwaters, i.e. controlled flood irrigation, was pioneered by Tiburcio Benegas of El Trapiche, above.
Winemaker Juan Roby led the tasting – I especially loved the 2017 Guarda Chardonnay.
As our tasting finished, Juan encouraged us to hurry outdoors to capture the sunset over the vineyard. It was spectacular.
Then we sat down to a wonderful formal dinner catered by the winery’s restaurant Fogón. The appetizer course was sweetbreads.
And of course there was beef from the Argentine pampas……
….. followed by an exquisite dessert: grilled and fresh figs with marmalade, fig ice cream, sweet peach mousse, a grilled peach and almond praline.
As we lingered over dessert, Marcos Ortíz, one of the Fogón waiters came out of the kitchen to serenade us.
Then it was time to head back to our hotel in Mendoza City. And what a treat it was to walk out under a full moon, framed by the vineyard’s trees.
Pascual Toso – Barrancas, Mendoza – En route to the last winery visit of our trip, we stopped to walk out onto a bridge to look down on the mighty Rio Mendoza. Except…. the river bed here was dry at the end of summer. (As we drove across the bridge, we did see a narrow channel of water at the far side.)
Minutes later, we arrived at one of Mendoza’s first vineyards, Pascual Toso, named for the man who came from Piemonte, Italy in the 1880s and decided to make wine, as his family had done in the old world. In the early 1900s, he expanded into the Mendoza River highland of the Maipú region, at Las Barrancas, meaning small canyon. (Fun fact: Pascual was a friend of Alfredo Di Lelio of “Fettucine Alfredo” fame.) Today, Pascual Toso has 400 hectares (988 acres) of vineyards here.
We met winemaker Felipe Stahlschmidt in the winery (he worked at renowned Catena before coming here), and after greeting everyone with a glass of Toso Brut – the celebratory sparkling wine that remains their best-seller, along with a deep line of excellent reds – he told us a little about the winery. Tour leader Steve Thurlow is in the background; he put together such a wonderful trip through Chile and Argentina, and knows all these wineries and the personalities behind them very well.
On our tour, we saw the original concrete fermentation tanks, still in use.
For our tasting, we went outside to a shelter overlooking….
…… “las barrancas”… the canyon.
As a plant photographer, I was excited to be close to a unique parasitic plant from the family Loranthaceae. It doesn’t bother making roots in the ground, but takes its nourishment from plants to which it attaches.
But we were there to taste wines, and that we did. Pascual Toso (like many other Argentine winemakers) is working hard to chip away at Argentinians’ reverence for Malbec (which is the foundation of Argentina’s wine industry) by making truly excellent Cabernet Sauvignons and Syrahs. For one thing, Malbec bottles are much heavier in glass than other reds, because traditionally that’s how the wine was bottled; thus shipping costs are more. But winemakers like Felipe Stahlschmidt are anxious to see an acceptance of more sophisticated wines as Argentina comes of age in a global market. To that end, California vintner Paul Hobbs has worked as a consultant to Pascual Toso in managing the harvesting and oak aging of the high end red wines.
As we finished the tasting, we were treated to an asado, a traditional barbecue of goat, beef and chicken.
It came with a mouth-watering provolone fritter. At least, that’s what I think we were eating, because Argentines have many ways of eating melted cheese!
After the main course, we had dessert, accompanied by sparkling Toso rosé wine. Salut!
And that marked the end of our last official tasting, though we convened at a lovely restaurant in Mendoza City that evening for a farewell dinner, before flying off on our own to Buenos Aires for a final four days. I’ll leave that city and its botanical garden to another blog some day. In the meantime, muchasgracias if you managed to get this far with me on our delightful Chile/Argentina wine tour!
