If you’ve ever bought Argentine wine (probably not at the outrageous $2 prices that are standard down here) you can check the label and it will invariably say Mendoza. Mendoza’s dry climate and warm temperature make it one of the world’s great wine producing regions, and wine is certainly the theme of the city. Expensive hotels cater to the savvy wine tourist and wine tasting shops are all over the place. But the best way to experience the grape is to go right to the source. In a suburb south of the city, Maipu, it is possible to rent bikes and cycle from vineyard to vineyard, sampling some of the fine vintages along the way.
And it is. Let’s not kid ourselves, biking after drinking provides a bit of a rush and any place with a logo imprinted on those old oak aging barrels automatically wins credibility. Combine the two and you’ve got yourself an activity that sells itself. I travelled down to Maipu with a group I had met through a girl on the bus, one that included an Argentine couple, an almost-professional skier, and a girl with a cottage in Aspen. They all sound like better wine drinkers than I. Maipu is a little nasty, at least the town itself is. The main street is dusty, dirty, and scorchingly hot, only exascerbated by the steady stream of speeding cars and rumbling trucks. The green fields you’d imagine are instead ugly, boarded up buildings. But once the wheels are rolling, it doesn’t take long for the scene to shift to a more Tuscan feel: wine country under a blue sky. The road was busy; at a few points we had a police officer on a motorcycle trailing us. It took us a while to realize he was protecting us from bitter motorists rather than planning to ticket us. 
Travelling in such a large group has its problems. The first was getting the group motivated in the morning to move from coffee and sparkling water to thinking about biking. This was followed by the difficulty in trying to secure enough (working) bicycles so late in the day, and then trying to stick together on a circuit. We made a few stops, of course taking a few pictures of old farm equipment before trying out the popular red. Then there was lunch, a long drawn-out affair of appetizers, wine (of course) and overpriced little meals that took up a good deal of the afternoon. All this to the point that I don’t know if we truly deserved the “What a full day” comments I heard later while relaxing on a tenth floor rooftop bar. 
It was around this point that I went to get money from an ATM with the guy from Argentina. We both chose an ATM, but mine looked different than normal: there was an account number on screen with a bunch of options, one of which was “Withdrawl”. Apparently someone had left without finishing their transaction, and now I had the chance to do whatever I wished with their account. I yelled over the Argentina guy while I pondered this moral dilemma. Before we could take any action, the machine timed out. That is how I almost travelled to Mendoza for free.Mendoza is a place you come back to. The army returns every year to pay tribute to San Martin, the liberator who crossed the Andes to fight off the Spanish colonial powers (a deed which earned him a San Martin street in every single Argentine town). Any climbers attempting nearby Mount Aconcagua, the highest in the Western Hemisphere, return to base in Mendoza. And us conventional tourists return for the wine (and I’m told skiing in the winter). It was also the outdoor pool and hammocks at my hostel. On one occasion I found myself having dinner on a lively patio well after midnight (In fact it didn’t take long to realize that the patios were the places to be in the city: the one club we tried was a dingy hole of electronica and ugly people). On the May Day holiday as the rest of the world staged massive demonstrations, I biked through the large parkland west of downtown and saw essentially the entire town walking, laughing, or sitting and enjoying a full-day mate (the famed Argentine bitter tea). And you should see the spectacular cheap belt I picked up.
It only seemed appropriate that they served a full hot meal with wine on the night bus out of town. Life is good in Mendoza.
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