"It's my job, God is my friend."

Pepe Reginato does not speak English very well at all.  He had a translator describing the many details and steps of creating "champagne."  His English statements were few and far between, but this one really had made me smile. "It's my job, God is my friend."  If he had said, "I am thankful and enjoy my profession." I would not have remembered his statement.  How his simple English made his thoughts so much more meaningful.
He may not know much English, but what he does do well is create a mean bottle of sparkling wine, and smile the most genuine expression of friendliness I have seen in weeks!  His fantastic laugh is unique and guttural, and speaking of gut!  His upper body is enormous, his biceps large from a life of hard work, his shoulders broader than any I have seen down here, and his huge gut pouring comfortably over his thin belt.  Casually dressed in jeans and a purple horizontal stripped tee shirt Pepe followed us around his own winery during the tour.
He showed us how the thousands of cellar-ed bottles are turned daily, just a small bit in order to carefully collect the residue from the fermenting yeast into the neck of the bottle.  (In most wineries it is done by a machine, but for years Pepe's own hands touched each bottle dozens of times before it reached our tables to be enjoyed.  Now he has some help turning the bottles, they only have one machine but still need many hands to make it happen!)
He demonstrates the freezing of the neck of the bottle, the removing of the temporary cap, and the replacing it with a cork.  He preforms the tasks of wrapping the metal cage and the foil around the cork, and then he brings us upstair to the table that can hold 6 or 8 people who label each bottle by hand with three separate stickers per bottle!
We go back downstairs and proceed to drink the most delicious sparkling I have ever had.  Also, the only sparkling that I have ever seen which is derivived from malbec grapes (giving it a richer pink color).
http://www.vineconnections.com/viewproduct.php?c=1&pid=196
Seriously people, go get you some today. Celebrate life!

I hated leaving, I wanted to drink sparkling and talk about how God is my friend too!  But we had to leave, I mean, Susana Balbo was waiting for us ;)
We pull away from Pepe's warehouse of an office onto a dull alley.  His winery is a non-descript cement building with a broken gate.  We head to Susana Balbo's palace of a winery.  She greats us in her crisp business clothes with a pleasant smile.  We receive a nice tour of a nice place, but it all feels a little more distant.  A little less real and more showy, to me.

We sit down to eat lunch.  At least 8 glasses stand like proud statues at the heels of our plate, which has a small green salad, cooked veggies, and a baguette toasted with cheese.  The lunch choice is refreshingly different to anything offered to me thus far in my Argentina experience.  I eat it all, enjoy every bit of each color I find on the plate.  Once they remove my dish, we listen to a Susana Balbo monologue a bit about her story (she is eating lunch with us... at the head of the opulent set table, which over looks miles and miles of her vineyard).  My heart feels for her, she has lost her husband recently and has a couple of children... and here I thought she was mostly a machine.  As she wraps up her talk they begin to bring course 2 of lunch (I did not know you could do that, 2 courses at lunch!)
A 20 oz ribeye is placed in front of me.
What's a veghead supposed to do?
I smile at the scorched animal, thank it for it's life... and try to use the butter knife they have placed at my left to further slay the way-over-cooked little bastard.  I love meat, I was raised in a house that always has half of a cow in the downstairs freezer.  I won't blab about why I don't eat meat anymore, but no one should eat meat that is as overcooked as the Argentines enjoy- it's ruined.

I ate a few bites, cut it up a little more and used the push-it-around-the-plate trick we all learned when we were young.  I then re-focused on the delicious wine.  I had no idea we would be given our own variety of dessert plate as a 3rd course!  This course was paired with the most tasty late harvest torrentes I have ever enjoyed and a fab late harvest malbec as well.

After the over exuberant lunch, we were given a challenge by Susana Balbo herself: create a new blend.
Five bottles of already perfectly created wine were sitting at each table, we were asked to make teams of four, and mix until we found the perfect blend.  Although we admittedly called ourselves the JV squad, team Rendezvous Bistro (with Alex as a sub from Trio) sticks together, through rich or poor, better or worse- I wanted to win.
It was so fun using a beaker and documenting different ratios of the varietals, trying to make a balanced blend.  The wines we were using are all amazing so nothing tasted poorly, but it was awesome to see the different qualities each mixture acquired.  Well, we got second place. and then headed out to the vineyards.

Here, my camera frame alternated from the two extremes in my view.  The migrant workers filling their metal bins with grape bunches for 2 pescos a bin ($.60) to the wine makers schmoozing the US wine reps.  The workers protecting their entire body with scrappy cotton clothes, while fresh summer apperal and heels were worn by the buyers.  Head down, maybe embaressed, and working fast with a knife in their hands compared to leisurly strolling, happy to feel the sun against their pasty skin.

The old men and middle age women literally run to trade their bin of grapes for a plastic coin which they redeem at the end of their long work day.  Proud of the fact that their grapes are all handpicked, I find it a little unsettling to watch.  The sun begins to set and we part ways with this grand spectacle of a winery.  As we slowly drive down the romantic dirt path, I wonder if Susana Balbo thinks that God is her friend...