You might think that wine tourism is a new phenomenon here in Mendoza but the fact is it was easier to visit a winery back in the 1930´s than it is today. Back then, when wine barrels came as big as houses and people drank 70 liters per person (per annum, man, woman and child) you could catch a train to Maipu or Lujan de Cuyo. Whereas nowadays you have to brave buses, bicycles and lunatic drivers to get to a grape house.
The good news is that this is all about to change since the governor went on a shopping spree in California recently and came back with eleven tram trains from San Diego (they cost 3.4 million dollars). The plan is to run people out to Maipu from the central railway station on Belgrano and the tram line plans to be well oiled and operating by the harvest festivities in March 2011. Maipu is where Mendoza’s original wine boom happened back in the 1880s, largely propelled by a new railway line to Buenos Aires that became a river of wine and a money train to the province. There is an historical irony in the fact that now the train is once again returning to breathe life back into a once important wine region.
