We Have a Winner!

In response to Thursday's quiz, Roger Emanuels of Santa Cruz, California, correctly identified the characteristic wines of Argentina: the red Malbec (from Mendoza province) and the dry but fruity white Torrontés (from Salta province). He wins a copy of Moon Handbooks Argentina.

A minor grape in its Bordeaux homeland, where it's usually used in blends, Malbec has become Argentina's signature wine export. Mendoza's dry climate and high heat bring it to perfection.

Torrontés, by contrast, is a high altitude grape that benefits from warm days and cool nights to reach its peak, so to speak - at Bodega Colomé, near the hamlet of Molinos, the vines thrive at nearly 10,000 feet above sea level, though one Uruguayan grower cultivates them only slightly above sea level. Most of the best Torrontés comes from slightly lower altitudes near the town of Cafayate. One enthusiastic French grower I met there suggested that consuming Torrontés was like "drinking the grape." At home, it's our preferred white.

In North America, Malbec is now pretty easy to find, Torrontés rather less so, but both are worth seeking out. Meanwhile, be on the lookout for future contests and giveaways on this blog.

From Chile, with Carménère

In the 19th century, the red varietal Carménère virtually disappeared in its Bordeaux homeland due to phylloxera, an aphid-like insect that fed on the roots of the grapevine. In the early 1990s, though, a French enologist inspecting Merlot plantings around Santiago discovered that, for over 150 years, Chilean growers had been confusing the two varietals and that, in Chile's biogeographical insularity, phylloxera had never been a problem.

Since then, Chilean growers have turned to Carménère as their signature varietal, a unique wine that's grown in much smaller quantities in just a few other areas: Italy, California, and Washington state. Still, it's often undervalued, as three articles in the wine section of last week's San Francisco Chronicle suggest. The longest piece is a summary of Carménère's history and current status; the second is a review of various Chilean vintages; and the third provides recipes with which Carménère would be an ideal pairing.

Carménère is almost always in our own home wine supply, but it's good to see this underappreciated wine getting some well-deserved respect. It's both good and affordable.

Win This Book!
Several weeks ago, I held an online contest to give away a copy of Moon Handbooks Chile. In conjunction with today's post, I have a another quiz in which the prize is either MH Chile or, alternatively, Moon Handbooks Argentina.

This is a two-part question: 1) name Argentina's two signature varietal wines, one red and one white; 2) name the Argentine province or locality best known for each. Please send your answer to the address in the header above. The previous contest's winner is not eligible this time, sorry.

Mars, This is Atacama

Last week, according to the Washington Post and many other reports, NASA scientists detected water vapor on Mars. Almost simultaneously, NASA personnel exploring the Cordillera de la Sal (pictured here), near the Chilean town of San Pedro de Atacama, also announced the discovery of water while exploring a cave in one of the world's driest deserts. The latter expedition is in fact intended to have Martian applications - if water can support life here, so goes the thinking, it might also do so in Martian caverns.

According to expedition scientist J. Judson Wynne, the Atacama water was utterly unexpected: " Why was water there? Is this merely a phenomenon related to these caves in particular? Is there some sort of moisture sink that results in the water concentrating in certain caves and not others in the Atacama Desert?" I'm surprised, though, that Wynne was so surprised - in such a vast, thinly populated place as the Atacama, where settlements have always concentrated at oases, the water table is uneven, and distribution of the Pleistocene fossil water is irregular. There are likely other similar sites, but with access too poor to support human settlement. The Atacama still holds many more secrets than any single expedition is likely to discover.

Aerolíneas by the Numbers

Everyone knows Aerolíneas Argentinas has serious problems, but now we have statistical confirmation of it. Until yesterday, I had never heard of the Asociación Argentina de Derecho de Turismo (AADETUR, Argentine Association of Tourism Law), a self-described travel consumer advocate, but it's published an interesting study of airline arrivals and departures. Unfortunately for English monolinguals, it's in Spanish only, but its tables are pretty easy to follow.

Not all of the study is online, but other parts appear in an article in yesterday's Clarín. Last year, only 24 percent of Aerolíneas flights departed on time, compared with 73 percent for LAN Argentina, though it's fair to add that Aerolíneas has much more extensive routes. Still, given the fact that Aerolíneas' delays often affect other airlines, it's remarkable that LAN could maintain its schedules in such a timely manner.

So far this year, Aerolíneas has almost doubled its ontime record, but it's barely half the flights and, after a shaky start to the winter holidays, that figure might drop dramatically. On the other hand, AADETUR ranks Aerolíneas and its domestic affiliate Austral as 81st and 82nd of 90 airlines around the world in ontime performance. Only a few airlines ranked worse, and most of those came from countries such Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Libya and Algeria.

Waiting for the Colectivo

Coming from the United States, where public transportation often keeps limited hours even where it's supposedly the best in the country, I've always appreciated that in Buenos Aires, I can walk out onto the street at 3 a.m. or later and, in no more than a few minutes, be riding back to Palermo on a reasonably comfortable colectivo (city bus). Despite late hours, through nearly 30 years I've never felt threatened or even uncomfortable aboard a colectivo (except when they've been so crowded it's almost impossible to move, but that rarely happens at non-peak hours).

These past several days, though, there's been no night bus service since the Thursday stabbing murder of a driver on the No. 96 bus in the provincial suburb of González Catán, a route that starts from the city neighborhood of Constitución. Demanding better security, drivers from the UTA transportation union have stopped service between 10 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., with no suggestion when they may lift the strike.

Bus routes in Buenos Aires, like that of the No. 15 bus pictured here, tend to be very long ones from the central city to the suburbs; in this case, it's a roughly 50-kilometer route that, in heavy city traffic, can take more than two hours in each direction. Unlike in much of North America, though, travel through the prosperous city tends to be safer than in the suburbs, which have many marginal shantytowns. This is what the UTA drivers see as risky, and they are appealing to provincial Governor Daniel Scioli for help.

For my part, I rarely take city buses to distant suburbs, and few other visitors should find it risky once nighttime service resumes. That doesn't mean the city is crime-free, but it won't deter me from taking the bus at any hour.

Meanwhile, as Argentines start their winter vacations, there's chaos at the city airport of Aeroparque and international airport at Ezeiza. According to the daily Clarín, more than 60 percent of flights from Aeroparque have departed late in the last 72 hours; several delays exceeded 12 hours. Most of the problems are with the recently nationalized Aerolíneas Argentinas and its close affiliate Austral, and whether they'll improve by the coming summer season is the looming question.

By then, though, you should at least be able to get a bus to the airport.

Rallying for the Atacama

Last January, organizers of the famous Paris-Dakar Rally canceled their 2008 event after the apparently Al-Qaeda linked murder of a French family in the West African country of Mauritania the month before. The Rally, which was to spend eight days in Mauritania, seemed too vulnerable to terrorist violence, and plans have been made to move the 2009 event to Argentina and Chile.

Thirty years ago, with both countries under stern military dictatorships, this might have seemed improbable, though Argentina did host soccer's 1978 World Cup (and won it, even as political activists and many innocents disappeared off the streets of Buenos Aires and other Argentine cities). But today, southern South America is a safe place to travel, and the Rally will start in Buenos Aires on January 3 and end there January 18.

The route will head south to Puerto Madryn, cross the Patagonian steppe to Ingeniero Jacobacci and Neuquén, then head north to San Rafael and Mendoza before crossing the Andes to Valparaíso. It will then head north to La Serena and Copiapó before recrossing the Andes to the Argentine cities of La Rioja and Córdoba, then back to Buenos Aires.

Not everyone is happy with the Rally, which encourages off-road vehicle travel that can be environmentally devastating. In Chile's far north, for instance, motorcycle vandals have fishtailed up geoglyph-covered hillsides to damage pre-Columbian archaeological sites (similar to the Pintados site, in the Pampa del Tamarugal, pictured here). In that context, some Chilean public officials and environmental advocates have expressed concern about the Atacama Desert's "Flowering Desert," which I described in an earlier post on the Llanos de Challe.

According to the online Santiago Times (subscription only) via Mercopress, the environmental NGO Fundación Terram and several regional politicians have argued that the Rally is a one-time publicity bonanza likely to damage the long-term appeal of the flowering desert, which draws thousands of spontaneous visitors to the area whenever rare rains arouse the dormant seeds that lie beneath its surface. The organizers seem so devoid of environmental awareness that their website suggests that participants will have a chance to see Emperor penguins - which only occupy the remotest parts of Antarctica, several thousand miles to the south.

In a time of declining oil supplies and global warming, any event that promotes fossil fuel wastage is dubious and, if the event must take place, both countries should ensure that it never happens again. If there's a positive side to it, it's that, for once, Argentina and Chile appear to be cooperating in the travel and tourism sector. Both countries can benefit by working to make the region more tourist-friendly, and cross-border services simpler.

Valparaíso Rises to a Challenge

According to the online Santiago Times (subscription only), the World Heritage port of Valparaíso will soon repair and restore five municipal ascensores (funiculars) that still operate in the city. Along with ten privately operated funiculars, they carry three million passengers per annum, with 10,000 regular users, between Valparaíso's commercial/financial sector and the hills neighborhoods.

All the funiculars date from the late 19th or early 20th century. At one time, more than 30 of them carried up to 13 million passengers per annum. Today, most of those are only inconspicuous, weed-covered wrecks, but the surviving ones are also tourist attractions similar to San Francisco's cable cars. Upgrading them will not be cheap: The 40-meter Ascensor Reina Victoria (pictured here, with its 57-degree gradient) will have a budget of US$160,042, with work to be finished in 165 days. The city is encouraging the private owners of the other ten to reinvest some of their earnings in the interests of safety and tourist appeal, but so far only Ascensor Concepción - in a prime tourist neighborhood - has plans to do so. For what it's worth, I've never heard of an accident on any of them.

There is one potential pitfall. It would be a shame if, in the process of preservation, the ascensores became nothing more than mobile museum pieces - like their San Francisco counterparts.

Getting Off the Ground in Argentina

Flying anywhere in Argentina is difficult without passing through Buenos Aires, the hub for almost all air services, so it's often necessary to backtrack to the capital to make connections. There are no direct flights between the provincial capitals of Salta and Mendoza, for instance, so it's obligatory to change planes at Aeroparque Jorge Newbery. This would be roughly comparable to flying between San Francisco and San Diego via Denver.

That's why it was interesting when last Friday morning, at 6:35 a.m., I received an email from the city tourism office of Puerto Madryn, in Argentine Patagonia, that Andes Líneas Aéreas was about to start flights to and from the city of Esquel, that morning. Such a route would make it easy to travel between wildlife-rich Península Valdés, near Madryn, and Parque Nacional Los Alerces, near Esquel (which also has a fine ski area just minutes from town).

Meanwhile, Spanish-controlled Aerolíneas Argentinas, with 80 percent of the domestic air market, is about to be renationalized, though there's speculation it may then be resold to Argentine interests. According to the Buenos Aires Herald, many Aerolíneas difficulties "stem from union mischief and state interference — domestic fares have not been allowed to keep pace with costs and fuel subsidies have faltered despite soaring world oil prices." With a workforce allegedly a third larger than it needs, it's hard to see how the Aerolíneas money-pit might be attractive to serious investors, and how service might possibly improve this coming season.

LAN Argentina, the domestic affiliate of Chile's efficiently run LAN Airlines, has taken up some of Aerolíneas slack, but precariously funded smaller airlines often come and go, with erratic service. At 9:09 a.m. that same morning, I received a followup email from Puerto Madryn stating that "due to circumstances beyond our control," the inaugural flight to Esquel would be suspended until Monday, July 21.