We wrapped up a four day stay in Mendoza, Argentina today by taking a cooking class at the Familia Zuccardi winery in Maipu.  We started by making bread dough, then making stuffed bread after it has risen for awhile.  To be honest, our first bread was pretty dense and not very good… 🙁  We also made three types of empanadas (cheese, meat and onion) plus a torta for desert. Those were far more successful… 🙂

We visited three distinctive wine regions in Mendoza area – Luján de Cuyo, Uco  Valley, and on last day, Maipú, during our first two days here, receiving premium VIP treatment at every stop.  That magic was performed by Roman Kowenski, our driver and tour guide for Mendoza.  If you ever come to Mendoza and want to treated like royalty (without having to pay fancy prices), we recommend Roman highly.  His web site it here, or his TripAdvisor page (#1 out of 28). Note that the page is in Spanish, but you can paste the url into GoogleTranslate, and then read the page in English.  Or contact him directly at his email (he speaks excellent English)

Most of the premium wines we tasted on this tour were good-to-excellent.  Our favorite was Tierra de Dioses (Land of the Gods) at the Vines of Mendoza winery (“bodega” means winery) in Luján de Cuyo. Bodegas Salentein (“bodega” means winery) had our favorite art and architecture. To top it off, Bodega Septima had the best lunch — excellent fixed-course meal with fine wine pairing for each course.

Roman even invited us to see his newly built home, and to meet his wife (Marta) and mother-in-law (lower right image, along with Roman).  It is always an extra treat to be able to see how people live in countries that we visit, though we do not get that opportunity very often.