Time to Start Planning

Boo and I have had plane tickets booked - for probably ten or eleven months - to head South of the Equator this October. That's the good news. The flip side, though, is that we have a flight into Lima, Peru, and seats leaving Buenos Aires, Argentina, a couple of weeks later and nothing booked in between. I'm definitely long past the "let's wing it when we get there" travelling mode; so, it's likely time that we started some actual planning.

As luck would have it, one of my co-workers, Juan de Luca, has a good friend that just returned from virtually the same trip. He suggested that we get together, have a couple glasses of wine and let his personal Evita regale us with stories from and pictures of her adventures. Scott and Stephanie Jaeger, of The Pear Tree restaurant, were gracious enough to let us set up shop, with laptop, in their lounge area and Evita got our juices going good.

And that was even without the wine, but, as usual at this site, it always comes back to a bottle or two.

525. 2007 Joseph Faiveley Bourgogne (AOC Bourgogne - France)

Domaine Faively is a well-known and well-established producer in Burgundy. In fact they've been making Pinot Noir for seven generations now. Tonight's wine doesn't make claims to be one of the winery's Premier Cru or Grand Cru wines, but, if it were, we likely wouldn't have been able to afford it. Juan de Luca favours the French and he picked this out as he thought that it would go great with a bite to eat - if we could leave some in our glass long enough to get past the pictures and trip tips.

Evita was great about helping us set some realistic goals for our little voyage. The best news was that she confirmed that it's definitely possible to fit the two countries into our plans - despite the short time and long distances. We might need to sleep on the odd plane, train or bus, but she's pretty sure that we should be able to slow down long enough to try a tango or check out the llama wool sweaters.

526. Bodegas Norton Privada (Mendoza - Argentina)

I actually wasn't familiar with this winery - although I now read that they're one of the most prominent producers in Argentina. I just figured that we should give a "local" wine a taste while we took at peak at Evita's B.A. shots. Not a 100% Malbec varietal wine, it's a Bordeaux blend of Malbec, Cab and Merlot - but, as might be expected, the Malbec percentage is substantially higher than you'd expect to find in a French blend.

This was a nice wine. Rich, with lots of dark fruit flavours - and it is likely better-priced than most wines of this quality due to its Argentinian roots. I'll definitely keep my eyes open for more Norton wines down the road.

And I now I have a winery to watch for while on the road to boot.

Evita has promised us a Top 10 List of her favourite stops on her trip. I could easily spend more nights gabbing with her - all in the effort of planning our trip naturally.