DAY 25 Wednesday, February 8. San Antonio, Chile
San Antonio serves as the port to Santiago, and some passengers took an excursion there.
I found a company called Bodegawines that offered tours for small groups. We had made friends with a couple with similar wine tastes to ours, so off we went to visit three wineries.
The first one offered the best quality wines, in my opinion, Bodega Wines RE. The RE designation is interesting. I don’t know if it is an official designation in Chile, but I’ve encountered it a few times now. It signifies a return and revival (“RE,” get it?) to old processes and ideas, qualities, and combining them with new technology and techniques. At any rate, we bought a whole case of their wines.
Not all of their wines, though, were to our taste. One of the old processes they revived was to ferment their grapes in large, barrel-size earthenware jugs, half buried in the earth, to maintain a good temperature and actually to support the weight of all that liquid. The mixture of grapes may include some red grapes as well as white, though they do not stir the mixture to color it, just leave it to ferment. The result they call “orange wine,” and they relish the chalky taste. I have to confess, I don’t.
The second winery was a quirky star-up by a couple from Argentina. They make, I think, quirky wines—very interesting blends of grapes that grow side-by-side in their vineyards—and a nice “port” in homage to their Portuguese heritage.
The third winery was more like the headquarters of a consortium of beverage companies, a big, wedding-palace kind of place offering a lovely lunch and OK wines. The ship’s bus tour stopped there, too, and those folks bought lots of their product.
This is the start to a new leg of our voyage, themed “Antarctica Explorer.” Quite a few passengers ended their cruise here, in particular the mobility-challenged, and we took on 230 new ones, who have an overall younger look. Also five Antarctica experts who will be giving talks on their specialties.
