Spanish Lessons

Bright and early Monday morning Jake and I went off to school with our notebooks and pens. We are taking Spanish lessons at Intercultural, about 8 blocks from our apartment building. We had taken placement exams the week before so when we got there we were assigned to different rooms. My class has just one other student, a woman from Ireland who has been taking lessons for the last 6 weeks. We plunged right into different subjunctive tenses and uses of the subjunctive. In my class, Silvina teaches from 8:30 - 10:30 am. Then there is a half hour coffee break outside where students mingle and sign up for optional lunches delivered to the school and afternoon activities. Vivi teaches from 11 - 1pm and then we break for lunch for an hour.

On Mondays the school hosts a language exchange in the afternoon. Students and anyone from town can attend. The first hour all conversation is in Spanish and the second hour in English. There were three Mendozans in my group. One used to work in NYC as a taxi driver, security guard and waiter before retiring back to Mendoza. The other worked as a waiter in Buenos Aires but has a house in Mendoza that he has been renovating for the last two years to rent out eventually. Students are from all over the world and of all ages. Duane is a pilot who works wildfires in northern California during the summer and travels to do mountaineering during the northern winters. There is a former school administrator from Chicago who has a year off. A young guy from California who is traveling for a year. A Brit who is traveling South America by motorcycle for 8 months. A South African woman accompanying her husband to live in Mendoza for 2 years or more as he works for the wine industry. It is astonishing to me how many people from Europe are able to arrange to travel for months or even a full year.

This afternoon we took the wine appreciation class. The teacher is the director of a sommelier institute in Mendoza. He explained (in Spanish) what the parts of the grape vine and grape are called, how wine is produced, and how to taste wine. We then evaluated one white and one red wine. The white was a 2008 Trapiche Sauvignon Blanc from Maipu (a suburb of Mendoza basically). It had a wonderful aroma of tropical fruits, but was too acidic to my taste. It did have a strong lemon/grapefruit taste if you like those flavors in a wine. The second wine - ahh, magnifico! It is a 2006 red wine (mixed varieties) from the El Peral vineyard in Tupungato, a town at high altitude in the province of Mendoza. The color was very dark and it had a strong scent of plums with undertones of strawberry. The sommelier also explained that the wine had been aged in an oak barrel giving it a vanilla and chocolate taste and that it had undergone some secondary fermentation which gives it a slight taste of leather or horse (I know, sounds unpleasant, but I didn't really notice those overtones anyway). Everyone in the class loved the wine as did Jake and I. The teacher labeled it "un vino para conversar", a wine you might break out after dinner because of its exquisite taste and ability to foster conversation.