Wheels and Wine

Before leaving the amazing country of Uruguay, we decided to spend two nights in the tiny city of Carmelo. I had read a few blogs that recommended visiting some of the vineyards in the area, and anything with caramel in the name sounds like a good idea to me.



We had originally booked a super cheap hostel that we honestly weren’t excited about. We figured it was just two nights, and we were going to visit the wineries and explore the city anyway, so what the heck. A few days before our reservation, the hostel contacted us that there was a mistake on Booking and the room wasn’t actually available. Booking agreed to search for a new accommodation for us that met our same request for dates, etc. Because of the short notice and lack of availability, we ended up with a free upgrade to a Boutique Hostel that normally would cost $120 per night (for a hostel!!). 

Even though we’ve had better bikes, it didn’t stop us from paying $10 to rattle along the dusty, rock filled, farmland roads in search of these vineyards I’d read so much about. After about 30 minutes we stopped at Campotinto for our first tasting. Tastings are quite different than what we are used to back home. It's more of an event with food pairings, long histories of the winemaking process, lunches, etc. Here, we had two options: 3 tastings of classic or 3 tastings of reservas. They’re more expensive than the $5-7 tastings back home, too. We decided to give it a whirl and share a tasting. 

We biked on until reaching El Legado, the better stop of the day (and where we spent the next 3 hours)! It’s a good idea to call ahead and actually have a reservation, but we were lucky and the owner gave us a tour of the whole vineyard and provided an amazing tasting. We bought the meat and cheese platter and each had 3 tastings (including one reserva). We even tried the reserva straight out of the barrel!



Carmelo was a neat stop, but we don’t think we’d go back. This just happened to work out for our travel plans since we were headed to Buenos Aires for a night to catch our flight to Bariloche, Argentina. We had a fun day at the wineries, but the rest of the town was a bit too sleepy for us. On to more adventures!