Monday was Thanksgiving Day in Canada and it was also a holiday in Peru. We were told it was Navy Day, or Admirals’ Day, or for some Admiral who was considered the Peruvian of the millennium, but after looking things up online, it appears it was Battle of Angamos Day, to commemorate the Peruvian naval defeat in the Battle of the Pacific in 1879, allowing Chile to advance a land war and take Peruvian and Bolivian territory into what is now modern-day northern Chile.
We started the day with breakfast at the hotel, then headed to the rooftop of the hotel to see what the city looked like. It was quite the shock in the daylight to see all the sand dunes right at the edge of town. Although it makes sense knowing that Ica is in the middle of a desert.
We took tuk-tuks to the Plaza del Armas to look for tours. We settled on a winery/wine tasting/pisco tasting tour, and it went really well. Our tour guide was Roberto and the 6 of us piled into a van and we headed off to our first stop. We started at the Tacama winery just outside of Ica. It is the oldest still active winery in not only Peru, but all of South America starting operation in 1889.
It was originally a Franciscan monastery that was later sold off and converted over to a winery. The only original part from the monastery days is the bell tower, and they still use the original bell (dated 1815) to call the workers to the fields three times a day. This was the only traditional winery we were visiting with “western” winemaking equipment, so we did enjoy some samples and bought a few bottles.
Not too bad a haul for $100 equivalent. While they make wine, they are known for their pisco, which is a fortified grape brandy, similar to grappa. And I don’t think anyone really cared for it all that much, but it was part of the tour so we kept drinking it. All the way along the Route of Pisco.
Our next stop was to the Pisco Soria, an artisan winemaker. They don’t use traditional methods for completing the wine, they let it ferment for 12 days, then add pisco to it to kill off the fermentation process. Thus there is a taste of pisco in the wine. Also, Peruvians like sweeter wines, and most tasted like a type of rosé. The piscos they make there are just essentially home brew. The matriarch of the Pisco Soria was sitting in her front rocking chair out front to ensure everyone enjoyed her wines and piscos.
We continued on to La Bodega Viñedos Ruiz where we saw the full process for making artisan pisco… an industrial scale still.
Which is sensible, since the piscos kept tasting just like home brew. The next stop was an artisan winery with four varieties of wine, where it looked like we woke up the bleary eyed owner. That was followed by another with four wines and four piscos; just for good measure, we bought a bottle of guanabana pisco to try as well. So the wine tour essentially degraded into a home brew tour and kind of felt a little like going caroling.
Being the holiday, it was the day for the Inca Rally, an auto race driving through Peru. They can essentially go as fast as they’d like on the highways, but have to slow down in the towns and cities. We got passed by one of the cars in our travels.
Finally we made it to a restaurant for lunch to try to counteract some of the effects. I had a great seafood medley, and since Dave wasn’t with us in Puno when the rest of us tried it, he had cuy (guinea pig). It was done in a similar way to how Rox had it, and like her, he said it kind of tasted like KFC. Kentucky Fried Cuy?
We got dropped off back at the Plaza del Armas, and took tuk-tuks to our hotel, and it was time to nap/pass out for a bit and recover after all of the wines and piscos and a very substantial lunch. In around that time the wind started to pick up and a sandstorm blew in. It wasn’t as bad as the one Rox and I experienced in Egypt, but there was sand everywhere, you could taste it, feel it in your eyes and mouth, and it was just hard to breath. You couldn’t even see the sand dunes anymore.
That evening, after the sandstorm had ended, we went to the rooftop, sat on the couches yet, and decided to crack open some of our wines we had bought. We ate some snacks and were having a good time, minus the cool desert evening air. A few bottles in, I was about to turn to Nathan and tell him to stop shaking my couch, when I realized that he wasn’t even touching it, and everyone was doing the same. We all quickly looked around and realized that wasn’t the case. Everything shook gently for about 3 seconds, similar to gentle turbulence. That’s when we realized it was a small earthquake, as nothing else could move a 4 story, concrete building like that. After looking things up on the US Geological Survey website later, there was a magnitude 4.7 earthquake in northwestern Argentina. While the epicenter was about 400km away from us, the timing was exact.
We ended up going through 9 bottles of wine throughout the evening, and had a great time chatting until heading to bed about 1:00.
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