Kathleen
Uruguay – Montevideo
April 2, 2014
The capital and major city in Uruguay, Montevideo is the bustling epicenter of the country. This town is on a peninsula like the other two we have visited in Uruguay, which is a challenge for the much greater amount of traffic. The streets are narrow and one-way and most of the locals choose to ride the bus in and out of the city as parking is quite scarce. We have a bit of a problem when arriving to out apartment because we can’t even find street parking for a short time while we check in. Eventually, we work it out and find a parking garage, but we realize that this is not a great place to be saddled with a car.
The city itself does not seem to have a ton to see. We peruse the meat market (this is actually a huge building down by the port with any number of vendors grilling meat for vistors’ lunches and dinners. It is quite a site to see the sausages, lamb, beef, chicken, and god knows what other carnivorous fare. Don’t worry, there is a vegetable. Most of the stands will cook you up a red pepper if you want. Not sure how this became the veggie of choice, but it is better than all meant all the time. I order a piece of chicken and a salad and Steve ops for a meaty platter and some french fries. We certainly do not leave hungry and the grilled meats are delicious (we probably didn’t need the fries, but oh well).
Since we have a car, we are able to drive out to tour an Uruguayan vineyard which is just about 20 minutes outside of Montevideo. Bodega Bouza is a beautifu, small production vineyard complete with peacocks as well as local wildlife and, of course, the vintners collection of old cars (this is the second out of about 5 vineyards we have visited in South America where we found an antique car collection). To his credit, he has some very nice specimens, mostly early Fords but a also a splattering of offerings from other parts of the world. They give us a very informative tour which explains the production process and their wines and then sit us down for our tasing which includes several excellent wines and a gigantic platter of meat and cheese (unfortunately, this was directly after our lunch at the meat market, so we could not really do it justice). We tasted a viognier/chardonnay mix, a tanat, tannat/merlot and a straigt merlot. The tannat is a grape brought over from Europe that has been found to grow well in the Uruguayan soil. It is somewhat comparable to a merlot but seems a bit more fruit-forward. We particularly enjoyed the two blends and would definately buy them at home. The vineyard does export, however, since their production is quite small, so also is the volume they are able to export to the 4 or 5 countries to which they currently sell their wines. It seems likely that they will expand and become known as a name in Uruguayan wines.
Uruguay as a whole was very easy to navigate. The people were quite friendly and we definately enjoyed the three towns we were lucky to visit. It would be intersting to see a bit of internal Uruguay, but the country is small and we felt like we hit the highlights. We would definately reccomend some time in Uruguay to fellow South American travelers.
