Finca Adalgisa

Occasion: A quiet dinner at our boutique hotel
Location: Finca Adalgisa in Mendoza (fincaadalgisa.com.ar)
Edibles: informal tapas dinner - spicy artichoke hearts; goat cheese sampler; jamón; lots of bread and house wine

Musings: We stayed at two boutique hotels in Mendoza, Lares de Chacras and Finca Adalgisa. They were about five minutes apart, in a neighborhood that was basically a nice suburb. Of the two, I liked Lares de Chacras better - bigger, more charming room and cheaper rates - but Elizabeth liked Finca Adalgisa better for the atmosphere and food.

Finca Adalgisa is ostensibly on a vineyard, but that "vineyard" is a bunch of grapevines in the house's backyard. They make some table wine once every few years but mostly sell their grapes to real winemakers. While I enjoyed our stay, I thought their advertising bordered on fraudulent.

They do have a very lovely Greek-influenced sunroom where we spent a lazy evening nibbling on simple tapas and playing Scrabble (with a letter distribution based on Spanish - tricky). [Coincidentally, we ran into some guys who had been on the ferry with us to Colónia. They contribued their two cents on some disputed Scrabble words, but didn't help us much as they were split themselves. Later, I was vindicated by Merriam-Webster online.]

O. Fournier Winery

Occasion: Wine tour lunch
Location: O. Fournier winery in Mendoza (ofournier.com)
Edibles: crispy pastry over caper cream; sliced, deep-fried eggplant with croutons and a tomato sauce; choice of lemon risotto with ginger and cherry tomatoes or steak with blue cheese; orange sorbet and a molten chocolate cake with coffee ice-cream and almond foam for dessert; and, of course, a selection of O. Fournier's wines to pair

Musings: After touring the Salentein and Andeluna wineries, the finale of our Ampora wine tour was lunch at O. Fournier. O. Fournier is a modern and high tech winery, but its owners also place a high premium on aesthetics: the main building (first picture) has won awards for its architecture, and the dining room (pictured above) was designed to offer a stunning panorama while you eat.

The lunch we had was extravagant and absolutely up to the high standards of the winery and the surroundings! While the style of the food was a little gimicky and molecular-gastronomic for my taste, I greatly enjoyed the lunch and we were all completely stuffed when we were done.

You could really tell that the head chef (who I believe is the owner's wife) was intellectually curious about food and prepared everything that came out of the kitchen with love and care. Our tour guide Myfanwy (Welsh, pronounced mee-van-wee - it gave me problems all day) asked for a simple salad instead of the offered mains and got an artistically-arranged, colorful plate of veggies with all manner of flourishes and garnishes.

I must point out that the steak was the superior main course option, as evidenced by the fact that the steak-eaters (myself included, naturally) trounced the risotto-eaters in cleaning their plates!

Las Negras

Occasion: Dinner on our first night in wine country
Location: Las Negras in Mendoza (lasnegrasrestaurant.com.ar - as listed on their business card, but the site was down when I tried it)
Edibles: I had three apps for my meal - the empanadas, followed by octopus, and beef carpaccio; Elizabeth had the chicken rollatini

Musings: A swanky but intimate restaurant within walking distance of our hotel. (It's a strange walk, though. Mendoza doesn't have many sidewalks so you're either on the side of the road like a hitchhiker or on the gravel shoulder, alarmingly close to the deep irrigation ditches.)

By this time in the trip, we were both getting a little glutted from our indulgent vacation meals. Instead of steak, I went with the carpaccio. (My version of light eating.)  They say the better the ingredients, the less you have to do to them. By this measure, Argentinean beef proves its mettle by being superb without any cooking at all. Subtle, buttery and coolly unctuous, I could have eaten this dish all day.

The other dishes were less exciting. They make their empanadas with a puff pastry, which I found too greasy. The empanadas also came out room temperature on the outside but burning hot in the middle, which made me suspect that they had been microwaved. Elizabeth's rollatini was slightly dry, but that's a pretty endemic problem with that technique.

The wine was cheap and excellent, no less than we expected based on the location.