Yesterday was wine day. We ate fabulous food and tasted seven Chilean wines varying from two sparklers to pinot noir, and three whites, two sauvignon blancs and a chardonnay. We finished with a carmenère.
So to begin, we met our host’s friend Danilo at the house and walked from there to the Mestizo restaurant where we had tried to eat on Sunday in Parc Bicentario. We sat on the terrace overlooking the hills of the park, golden like the hills around Los Angeles, and even saw some of the local pink flamingoes…apparently they are pink from the grubs they eat in the ponds where they live. There is a group of glider enthusiasts who use the hills as well. We watched them towed around by a prop plane before they took off in the vectors.
Lunch started with a sauvignon blanc from the Amayna Vineyard near Santiago. Excellent. Not so dry and tart as a Marlborough New Zealand or a Sancerre from the Loire, but very nice. The second, which we did not write down, was pleasant but fuller, more in the style of an Italian chardonnay. Lunch—well, we started with three tapas size plates. Grilled octopus on a bed of thinly sliced potatoes with salad; loco, a local form of abalone, with light lettuces and very small cubes of boiled potatoes; and Chilean empanadas, two of spicy ground meat and two of light almost runny cheese. After this we had three salads—with varying toppings. John’s was shrimp and squid tempura style, Ben’s was covered with sliced ahi tuna and Danilo’s had sliced salmon and salmon croquettes.
After this filling lunch, we headed off to Cerro San Cristobal, a large hill rising about 300 meters from the city floor—the floor is about almost 600 meters above sea level…that means were were about 3200 feet up—enough to make ears pop at the top of the hill. The views of the Andes, as well as the city, at that altitude are grander than any we have seen before. As the Andes range in the distance, you can almost feel the glaciers melt. Haze from the summer dust gives them an ethereal atmosphere of blotches of white—the glaciers—to the golden brown of the dry hills all softly defined by the summer air. Not crisp but fine.
After our day in the park, climbing almost to the Virgin Mary who stands atop the hill with her arms open to all, we hopped in a rush hour taxi for the cheap (taxis are very cheap here) ride to the house. The incline railway (funicular or ascensore depending on your language) was unfortunately inoperative. We also overdosed on sugar, almost diabetic shock, with a mote—this is apricot juice over a dried apricot, often served with cereal in the bottom of the glass and eaten with a spoon. Without the cereal a really sweet treat, with we think we could do without.
As the evening began we took the bus and then the metro down to Barrio Lastarria to the Bocanariz (Mouth and Nose) wine restaurant for dinner. Lastarria is a pretty street of restaurants and strollers, said to be one of the “in” barrios of the city, where we had walked on Friday. Our host Tim is friendly with the Bocanariz owners and arranged for a table for us right next to the sidewalk just inside the restaurant. The interior walls are covered with wine lists and corkscrews! The wine list is huge at 362 altogether, ranging from inexpensive flights of wine to bottles in the cellar that range up to 800,000 Chilean pesos (about USD 1,500)! We saw them after dinner in a tour of the cellar.
Dinner started with two tapas, one of salmon roe with guacamole. The roe was served on a cornet of crisped egg roll wrapper with creme fraîche in the point under the roe. Very light and very nice. John may well make this at home. The other tapa was a small plate of Chilean oysters. These are very sweet but they are tiny, no more than 2.5 cm or 1 inch diameter. Rather than scream as you eat them, they are so small they only make a slight squeak.
The mains were shell pasta stuffed with pignolis and various vegetables for Ben. The dish was light, but it had a creamy sauce that made it very substantial in taste. John had conger eel on a bed of mushrooms, artichoke bottoms, little boiled potatoes and sliced miniature zucchini in a short broth. Very tasty. The eel had been grilled. Small potatoes are ubiquitous here.
The Chilean wines were very interesting, all very fine, but some of them quite different from what we expected. We accompanied our tapas with two sparkling wines, a rosé and, the second, a mix of pinot noir and chardonnay. We preferred the mix, though the rosé was lovely. Sweeter than John expected, and not so dry as the sparkler Tim served us on Friday night. The second set were a pinot noir, which they serve cold here, and a chardonnay. The pinot noir was lovely. It had a very nice nose, quite full in flavor, and just what Ben wanted. John’s chardonnay was excellent too. Since Chile’s signature wine is carmenère we thought we should finish off with one, but the sommelier didn’t speak too highly of the varietal and only had three in the cellar. One she described as light, the second as rather sweet and the third full in the style of a shiraz. We had the third which we enjoyed, but I look forward to trying more in Valpo.
We head off to Valpo a day early tomorrow morning and return to Santiago on Saturday before heading down south to Punta Arenas on Sunday. This will reduce hassling transfers on Sunday morning and give us a chance to enjoy lunch on Saturday in Valpo with friend Tim and then another fine night in Santiago before we leave.
And now to the Museum of Contemporary Art….
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