The region of San Juan is an important wine producing region like Mendoza. While I visited many wineries in Mendoza, I just decided to visit two in San Juan. I haven’t much time with the other activities I did.

General information

All the wineries are reachable with public bus. The cost of a single ticket is between 5AR$ and 10AR$ depending how far it is. For more information, I recommend you to go to the tourist information in the bus terminal. They are helpful and can tell how to reach a place with the public transport. It was necessary for me as Maps didn’t work for the public bus in San Juan.

Museo S. Graffigna

Santiago Graffigna is the biggest producing winery in Argentina. The production counts 12 million bottles per year. The bus 12A takes you to the winery in around 30 mins from the city center. You don’t have to do a reservation.

The museum shows a lot about wine production and is interesting, overall if you are new in the wine world. Nevertheless, I felt disappointed sometimes as it was too fake. As an example, there were the fake wine cellar and the fake vineyard. The visit is done in Spanish and English if necessary. If the guide was doing is best for speaking in English, the lack of practice made the presentation less informative than the Spanish one.

The tasting is rather simple, just two wines. However, we won’t complain as the visit is free. There were one white wine and one red one. Wine are good but not astonishing. My personal impression is that the winery is too big and too common. I missed personality and inspiration. Last information, the winery is now part of the group Ricard.

Merced del Estero

The next winery, Merced del Estero, is completely different. The winery is young, small and own by a family. For getting to the winery, I had to come back to the center with the bus 12A and took another one, the 14. A bit further, it took me around 45 minutes.

I told the owner that I came by sending him a mail. And next, you just have to follow the schedule for showing up at the winery. He started by doing a tour in the between the tanks room, followed by a tour of the wine cellar. Finally, I tasted some wines. We didn’t go to the vineyard, but you can see it while going to the main building. There are two types of cultivating grape: the French style and the Italian style.

The tasting included 4 wines: 2 white wines and 2 red wines. The grape variety was Torrontes that is a classic in Argentina. One was really sweet, as they cut off the fermentation at mid time so the sugar level is higher to the detriment of the alcohol level. In general, wines were sweet. Although the wine was good, I found it a bit too sweet for my preferences.

As I conclusion, I really liked this visit. Even if I already did many visits, I still learned something. For example the reason of cultivation in a specific style. Moreover, the owner was really friendly, we spoke quite a lot about many topics. A great end of a day!

It is also possible to visit the Vinas de Segisa with the bus 16. However, it was already too late for me for doing it.