Wine Tasting at Lunchtime.

CASABLANCA, CHILE, 1st March, 2023.

A great night's sleep, the best since we left the UK. That despite hearing dogs barking several times. Breakfast is delivered to the door at 10am consisting of a cheese and ham sandwich, fruit juice, a cereal bar, yoghurt and tea bags, all in a wicker basket.

Our destination this morning is Casas del Bosque Vina, a local vineyard. We're hoping that there will be a tour available. We're in luck, it's 11:30am and the next one is at 12:15. It's a marvellous vineyard in a fabulous setting. We choose the premium tour which includes tasting five wines. It turns out that we have our own guide, a lovely girl called Denise, who speaks excellent English. Although, later in the tour we have to teach her the expression "muck spreading" when she was explaining about using the grape residue as fertiliser.

Denise shows us a cloth map of the vineyard with different variety of grapes. The vineyard was started in 1993 by an Italian family. The white grapes are grown in the valley (Casablanca) and the red on the hillside because that attracts more heat from the sun. They import somred grapes from the Maipo valley including Camenere and Cabernet Sauvignon. Their premium wine is La Trampa selling at £54 a bottle.

We see the bottling process, the stainless steel vats and some concrete eggs that are used for the premium wines. Finally, we see the oak barrels including some made from Hungarian oak.

Finally, the wine tasting. We enjoy a Sauvignon Blanc, a Rose, two reds and finishing with La Trampa! Rosie sipped at each wine and passed the remainder on to PG. I was definitely feeling the effects of the wine by the end of the tasting. We left the vineyard at 2pm, Rosie drove back to the hotel.

We spend the rest of the afternoon by the pool with RJ venturing in. A couple of women joined us poolside otherwise we had the place to ourselves. RJ tried the hot coals and later we had a sauna.

We tried to have dinner in Las Dichas but the restaurant only opens at night on weekends. A passing motorist shouts "Vina" at us out of his window but when we arrived back at Casas del Bosque that too was shut. On to Casablanca. We followed signs to a restaurant but that also was closed. Eventually, we ended up in a restaurant used by locals . The food was excellent, fish fo RJ and chicken for PG. Unfortunately, their card machine was broken so we had to pay cash.