Berto y las bodegas: la aventura sigue

So after checking in at the hostel in huacachina, we spent the morning with Sian getting coffee, wandering around and getting to know each other. The director at the hostel offered both vineyard and buggy/sandboarding tours so we were all kind of debating that. Upon inquiry we learned that the bodega tours can be done whenever and usually take around 4 hours. The buggys were set times and run 3 times a day.  We decided to start off with the vineyard tour and then move to the buggies after. So we pay the guy and tell him well be back about 1:30. When we arrive back there was berto our fearless wine tour dude ready to roll. Oh berto...I really do wish I had a video of you. Words just don't give you the same effect. 

1st let's start by saying that I think berto was actually meant to be paparazzi or has had a life long dream of this. Everywhere we went he wanted to take photos of us. He would even throw us into candids. It was a riot. None of us could keep from laughing. So the first bodega we went to was "el museo". It was this smAller style bodega with just a bunch of random shit. There were telephones and random weird instruments. It was like walking through an antique sore that just happened to make wine. All of perus wines are also VERY VERY sweet. He kept wanting to give us more tastes at this place and we all just kept thinking that it was too sweet to drink a bunch of. Apparently, according to the guy at the second bodega, the wine is sweet due to all of the sun. He grapes become almost overly ripe and produce a ton of natural sugar. Now if we had gone to one of the machine produced bodegas, we would have found what I consider more standard style wines. But these were the artisans. They didn't take any shortcuts. At the second bodega, a guy who worked there gave us the tour. He showed us the old setup where they still mash the grapes with their feet (sAnitized of course and while drinking something similar to red bull b/c it's done at night). And where it is filtered and how pisco (perus version of tequila) is separated. After the tour we went though the tasting and here they also make chocolates and jams with their grapes. That was my favorite part. Their chocolates were to die for. We ended at a 3rd bodega where we only tasted a few and left. Though I couldn't bring myself to buy any of the wines, I did buy a couple of bottles of pisco. Well have to try making some pisco sours when I return :)