Wine in the Casablanca Valley

The day before we flew out of Santiago, we rented a car and drove 90 minutes west to Casablanca Valley, one of the major wine regions of Chile. Not knowing how to drive manual, renting a car was a bit of an ordeal and much more expensive than we anticipated, but it was well worth the effort.

It was a perfect day weather-wise, and we made it to most of the valley’s vineyards — Veramonte, Morande, Vina Mar, Indomita, William Cole, and Casas del Bosque — doing a tasting or buying a bottle at all but William Cole (they were busy entertaining a wine critic). Veramonte definitely won for cheapest wine tasting, at around $0.75 for nearly a full glass, but Morande was by far our favorite, and we ended up buying 5 bottles there; we would’ve bought more if we didn’t have so much travelling left in our journey (our packs were heavy as it was). After visiting 5 other wineries, we finally had a late lunch at 5pm in the restaurant of Casas del Bosque, where we bought a cold bottle of Sauvignon Blanc to go with our home-made turkey and avocado sandwiches. We then drove 30 minutes to Valparaiso, where we´d spent New Year´s, to pick up a few dresses at a boutique Tina really liked. We finally made it back to Santiago in time for evening rush hour, and spent an hour or so getting lost and stuck in traffic. Still, it was a great day.

The next morning we got up at before 5am to get ready for our morning flight to Ushuaia, Argentina. Eric managed to knock out all the electricity in the room when he plugged his ipod charger into a loosely wired outlet in the hotel room – fortunately, the hotel staff was able to fix it and we made it to the airport with plenty of time.