Vendimia 2009, Huge Party

Vendimia 2009...This was a real treat.

The video is from a Mendoza News station.



Vendimia is a yearly festival which coincides with Argentina's annual agricultural harvest. Always the first week of March, in more recent years, it has become in large part a celebration of wine.

Also the Harvest Queen of Mendoza Province is chosen, which is more or less a beauty pageant. This is a huge deal in Mendoza. There have been many times when the father of the losing queen has filed lawsuits over the judging. The province of San Martin delivered the winning beauty this year a-mid controversy about the governor's dealings with the judges, blah, blah, blah. Our taxi driver told us that it was the same arguments every year, no matter who wins.

Many people from all over South America come to Mendoza for this grand festival and it is really a huge party that goes from Friday midday until Tuesday morning. We definitely tried our hardest to keep up with the locals but man, they party.

That night as we were pushing our way through the mobs of people that had formed on San Martin Ave. we started to realize the extent of the party. Each county in Mendoza has a float that displays their Queen candidate to all of the captivated on-lookers. They also throw fruit back and forth between the crowd and the parade participants making the street look like the end of a Gallagher Show.



We were starting to get a little squished by all the people on the streets and just so happened to see a fellow English speaking couple, cracking a joke about the old camera equipment that the tv stations were using. Will and Lara invited us to go to a resto-bar that their concierge had told them about. The concierge assured them it was the best spot in Mendoza to watch the parade and it wasn't long before we realized that she was right. 10 floors above the street, on a open-air terrace was just what we needed to get away from the crowds and relax. Decimo...More on this bar in another post.

Here are some pics of the parade from the terrace at Decimo.