Mendoza wine tour on two wheels, not quite as quaint as it sounds

It all seemed pretty picturesque, winery-hopping in Mendoza on a bicycle, peddling along dirt roads, inhaling sweet aromas from the vines and rose bushes growing on both sides of the path. The decision by my friends from Manhattan, Maddy and Jeff, to hire a driver for their Mendoza wine tour last August, had never made much sense to me.

That is, until I picked up a bike last month from BIKESANDWINES and headed off with my wife and two friends to sip some Malbec. It turns out, the principle wine country "bike path" is a poorly paved, narrow road, with no shoulders and a surprising amount of traffic from trucks perfuming the vineyards with diesel exhaust while honking at cyclists.

Don't get me wrong. Argentina's wine country is worth a visit, if only for the incredible hiking and eating opportunities. On our trip, we stopped at the Carinae boutique winery (Number 11 on the BIKESANDWINES map), so small that the bottles are all labeled by hand. Across the road is the Laur olivícola (olive plantation), where guests roam past rows of 100-year-old trees and learn the answer to the age-old question about what classifies something as extra virgin olive oil (pronounced "olive earl" by my culinary inspiration, Chef Johnson, who keeps "da Funk in da Food" on Larchmont/Mamaroneck public television, or at least did when I was growing up in the New York suburbs). You also get to taste some olive oil, and I mean actually sip it, not just moisten bread and sundried tomatoes. If you've been living in South America eating and cooking with only corn oil and girasol (sunflower) oil, it might just make you decide to splurge the next time you're at a Disco Natural or Tienda Inglesa.

I won't give away the EVOO secret, but I will share one olive oil factoid (and I hope I got this right): one olive tree produces about 100 kg of olives per year, and 8 kg of olives are needed to make 1 kg of olive oil, a process that involves milling olives, pit and skin and all, into a paste that is pressed, decanted to remove the water, and then aged in tanks. Intrigued? Watch a short video (above) that I shot showing the Carinae winery and Laur olivícola, and click here to read Jeff and Maddy's Small State account of their own journey to Mendoza.