Chile is driving us to drink. Not because it’s particularly stressful and that’s the only way we can cope, but simply because they make such good wine. In Santiago we drank a bottle almost every night. More often than not it was Undurraga Pinot Carménère, the wine that we discovered by chance back in Vicuña. We are now thoroughly addicted.
We picked up that first bottle because we were looking for a pinot noir. We have since learned that in this case the word “pinot” is just one of Undurraga’s brands and the name refers to the shape of the bottle, not the wine inside. We know this because the one touristy thing we did this week was to visit the Undurraga Winery thirty minutes south of Santiago.
Undurraga owns many vineyards in Chile, but the grapes are all brought to their central winery to be processed into yummy goodness. The tour of the beautiful grounds was actually the most “sciencey” excursion we’ve had on this trip, and that includes visits to tortoise breeding centers, natural history museums, and an observatory on top of a mountain. Our guide, David (Dah-veed), went into great detail on the agricultural and fermentation practices that enable them to fine-tune the growing of the grapes for the exact amount of acidity and sugar, the precise control of the fermentation process, and the delicacy of aging the wines in the right kind of barrels to produce the quality and flavors of each different wine. And then he started pouring.
The particular wine that Lea and I have fallen in love with is a Carménère. Here’s the story: The Carménère was a grape from Bordeaux that was wiped out in 1867 by a plague of phylloxera (sap-sucking insects) and presumed extinct. It turns out that the species survived in Chile, where it was mistaken for a merlot until its rediscovery by researchers in 1994. Since then, Chile has become the producer of 90% of the world’s Carménère and it’s really, really good.
The sad part of this story is that it’s going to be very hard if not impossible to find our new favorite wine when we get back to the States. However, it will give us something to look forward to if we ever come back to Chile. After two weeks in one city it’s certainly time to move on, but we just might return one day and (like the vines pictured above) put down some roots.
Retirement in Santiago?
One of the reasons for going on this South American tour was to scope out possible places to retire. While I’ve enjoyed many of the towns we’ve stayed in, Santiago is the first I could really imagine making a home someday. Part of that might be due to the familiarity of all its U.S. cultural influences and the little taste of home they afforded us. But aside from that, it has a lot of points in its favor:
It has nice hospitals (an important thing to consider in retirement). It has many more culinary options than other places we’ve been on this continent. It has an easy-to-use public transit system with a subway that makes Atlanta’s look deficient. It has a plethora of parks and museums, and is large enough to host as many cultural events as any big American city. It has real Asian grocery stores, so we can buy all the fish sauce, curry paste, and ramen noodles we need. It’s flat. And it has, as I’ve already pointed out, a very good wine selection.
Instead of staying in a hostel, we spent the last two weeks in an apartment. In fact, we’ve spent most of the last month in apartments or guest houses – which Lea has pointed out has resulted in less interaction with people besides ourselves. We’ll be back to hosteling for the foreseeable future, but I believe our apartment experience has been valuable for testing out what it would be like to actually live here and what adjustments we would have to make – either to our residence or to our expectations. The following bullet points have been the same for hostels as well as apartments, but the fact that they’ve held true for both shows that these are South American norms.
Tiny, Understocked Kitchens
Of all the places we’ve stayed, only two have had what I’d consider a full-size kitchen – the hostels in Chachapoyas, Peru and Vicuña, Chile. In both those cases, it was the owners’ own kitchens that we were allowed to use, and even then there was something missing – be it a cutting board, a sharp knife, hot pads, or trash can. The hostel where we stayed in Trujillo, Peru had a good-sized kitchen but the stove and oven didn’t work, forcing us to cook everything on a tiny electric burner the size of a portable camping stove. Mixing bowls, in particular, seem to be in short supply. Should we move to South America, an apartment with a full-sized kitchen may be hard to find, but we can take care of some of the problem by buying sufficient cooking implements to prepare an actual meal.
Hot Water and Air Conditioning
Neither of these are a given in South America, but starting in Santiago air conditioning seems to be much more widely available. We still haven’t had access to it except in the Galapagos Islands, Puerto López, Ecuador and one night in a Holiday Inn Express in Santiago. Nevertheless, we’ve seen a preponderance of air conditioning units gracing apartment buildings, including the one where we stayed. I guess the availability of such units is purely at the discretion of the apartment owner, just like satellite dishes back home.
Hot water is also an iffy proposition, one that we’ll have to take into consideration if we move here. We left behind the “death-by-electrocution” shower heads somewhere in Peru, but hot running water has still been untrustworthy. To date I haven’t seen anything like the hot water heaters in the United States. Instead they have pass-through heaters that use gas to warm water as it flows through the pipes to the faucet. In Santiago, at our landlady’s request, we turned the water heater off any time we weren’t using it, which meant having to reignite the pilot every time we showered or washed dishes.
Garbage Cans, and the Lack Thereof
This is something that’s bugged me all through South America, and it’s long past time to get it off my chest.
і¿What do these people have against garbage cans?!
Trash cans are more common in Chile than in the first three countries we traveled through, but size is still an issue. Garbage cans are tiny, if you have one at all. That picture above? That’s the waste can for the kitchen in our apartment in Santiago. It fits as much as you can stuff into a standard plastic grocery bag. Except for the can in the bathroom, which was tiny beyond belief, it was the only garbage can for the entire apartment. The complex had recycling for plastic, glass, and cardboard, so we had to line all our bottles along the wall until we remembered to take them out.
The garbage truck came by every day and compressed trash right under our window, thanks. We wondered why it came so often until I realized that the dumpsters for the entire complex (there were two) were no bigger than the garbage collection cans used by single-family houses in the United States.
At least they were using something. In Peru, the standard practice was to throw your grocery-sized trash bags out on the curb and hope the collectors picked them up before your trash was torn open by stray dogs and spread all over the street. The dogs won that contest nine times out of ten.
Now let’s talk about bathroom cans. This may be a little gross, so skip ahead if you want. In Latin American countries, the plumbing isn’t up to the same standard as it is in the United States. This means that you can’t flush toilet paper without eventually clogging the drain. They have many signs posted in tourist areas to explain this to foreigners who don’t know any better. Instead of flushing TP, you’re supposed to put it in the garbage can. If you’re very, very lucky, that garbage can will have a lid.
In my mind I’ve affectionately begun referring to these bathroom waste bins as “chamber pots.” In most of the places we’ve stayed, the chamber pot was the only trash can we had at all. In Vicuña, we couldn’t even find a garbage can in the kitchen. I’m pretty sure the owner was composting the organic waste – it was an eco-friendly hostel after all – but when I had to throw out other things, like food wrappers, I eventually had to go out into the street and look for a public trash can.
If we move to South America, we might have to import real trash cans and bags. Alternatively, we could roll with the way things are done down here. I still bet there will be far more trash cans in our own place than anywhere else in the city if we end up retiring here.
Now to escape from the trash compactor, here’s –
My Recommended Read for Chile
When picking a book to read for Chile, I went straight to Isabel Allende. The House of the Spirits was her first novel, which I would describe as an “expressionistic painting” of Chile in the Twentieth Century as seen through the eyes of three generations of unique, colorful women and one tyrannical patriarch. I had problems with Allende’s writing style (and her lack of paragraph breaks) but in the end I was glad I read it. The final chapters, dealing with the rise of Pinochet’s dictatorship, are especially powerful.
Check out my full review on Goodreads. While you’re there, sign up for an account and friend me!
Ciao for now.