There was plenty of wine transported up to Crystal Mountain for the week, and that doesn’t even cover the extra wine runs that were done, while we were up there.  For as many people that were up there, we didn’t run out of food, but the wine and the bottled water seemed to be neck and neck in the race for depletion.  We were all having a grand old time and while it seems that we enjoyed plenty of white wines, there were reds as well, because the dinners were all full bodied and grilled.  The Mendoza region of Argentina supplied us with a couple of good wines when we were having marinated pork tenderloins on the barbeque.

The first wine from Mendoza that I will mention is Vina Cobos Felino Malbec 2016.  This wine is a joint venture between Luis Barraud and Andrea Marchiori and the Californian Paul Hobbs; there inaugural vintage was 1999.  Paul Hobbs also has other wine ventures in other countries as well, in case you run into his name on the labels.  The fruit for this wine came from two famed sub-regions of Mendoza, Valle de Uco and Lujan de Cuyo, so it had to carry the more generic Mendoza, but Malbec is king of the district.  This wine was aged for nine months in American Oak, of which ten percent was new and it was bottled unfined.  This was a good deep inky violet colored wine with a good nose and very well balanced and very easy to drink with almost no decanting time.

The other wine from the Mendoza district was Finca Flichman “Paisaje de Tupungato” 2015 and this winery is over a hundred years of age.  Tupungato is the northern part of the smaller sub-region of the Valle de Uco and at the foot of Mt. Tupungato volcano.  The wine is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon with Malbec and Merlot.  The wine was aged in oak and some bottle time, before being released.  Just another easy drinking red wine with out a lot of fan-fare.  Another happy time for dinner.