Feb 6 Santiago Winery Tour

 Today's activity was an optional Globus tour to a nearby winery.  Our preferred choice was unavailable since wildfires in the Valparaiso area made the all day tour there impossible.  Rather than sit around the hotel room, we signed up for this tour.

One unexpected development in taking this tour was that Globus in Santiago ran a cash only business.  While every shop and restaurant had the hand held terminal to accept your credit or debit card, Globus wanted cash. They accepted either Chilean Pesos or US $.  With the CLP trading at about 1000:1 to the USD, it was easy to convert. But the ATMs in Santiago limited withdrawals to $200 per day. Some planning was required.

Also unexpected was the level of service. We had a driver and a guide for the two of us, taking us to and from the winery. At the winery, we joined  the standard tour of about 20 people.  Thankfully the winery groups people according to language.

Underraga was the winery in the Maipo valley we toured.  Very pretty.  They previously had hosted weddings and other events, but a recent earthquake had destroyed the event building.  They were rebuilding it, but it wasn't available yet.

Our tour guide.

The reason for everything

They plant these flowering bushes at the end of some rows.  They serve as the "canary in the coal mine" for fungus and other blights that can affect the grapevines. 

On to the barrel storage.  This one looked to be sampled quite a lot.

A cool and dry basement.

They had a small museum of pre-Columbian items.

Some sort of field hockey?

Definitely post-Columbian, located the area where we had the tastings. The wines were highly rated, but I have no taste for wine.  They seemed OK.

On the return trip, some of the wiring in the remote areas gave me flashbacks to Vietnam.

A small fire broke out near the road we were driving on.  The fire wasn't there when we drove to the winery. We heard nothing about it later, so it must have been dispatched quickly.

Along the road there were a number of communities of buildings thrown up with blankets and pieces of plywood.  In response the government has started a program of building homes for these people.  Definitely small homes, but a large step up from the slapdash places they lived in previously (and the trash that they threw down the hill behind their "homes".