Mendoza’s Wine Museum at Bodega La Rural
At Bodega La Rural, the winery tour takes a detour through the over one hundred years of Mendoza winemaking history. It includes all the usual stops, a quick loop through the vineyards, a jaunt through the fermentation room, and a sip at the wine bar – but the wine museum far eclipses all the rest.
Sixteen kilometers outside of Mendoza City, Bodega La Rural is one of Mendoza’s oldest wineries, dating back to 1885, and was founded by Don Felipe Rutini (namesake of the prestigious Rutini wines). While the winery was Don Felipe’s dream, his grandson, Rodolfo Reina Rutini, would dream up South America’s most important wine museum. Over the course of Rodolfos’s life he collected all manner of tools, gadgets, machinery and wine paraphernalia from wineries within the region.
Today, packed into one room with bits of machinery scattered throughout the winery, is a peek into Mendoza’s winemaking beginning in the 19th century, and chronicling the leaps and bounds that have taken place since that time. With historical props to aid the tale, tour guides became storytellers, explaining how wine was made, transported, and bottled before the arrival of new technologies.
Along the back wall stand a cement vats, reminiscent of Roman vases, and the precursors to the stainless steel tanks used in wineries today. In the front lot, parked between the Volkswagens and Chevys, are the antique carriages that once made the arduous 700 mile journey from Mendoza to Buenos Aires. And on the inside wall hang rusted hand tools used by coopers to shape the wooden barrels that made the journey possible.
All in all, when every pair of rusted pliars and piece of machinery have been tallied, the museum is home to more than 4,500 artifacts from South American wine history. The collection includes copper machinery, primitive presses, cooper tools, stoneware, oak barrels brittle with age, pumps, grape crushers, winemaking books, laboratory bottles, and countless other relics of days gone by. It’s a bit like playing “I Spy,” really, staring off into a heap of history and wondering what on earth a particular contraption was used for.
While some tools are easy to recognize, others have little relation to their modern counterparts. Tour guide Cynthia Videl explained how the industry transformed as new industrial materials and knowledge became accessible to winemakers: from wood, to copper and bronze, to aluminum, to stainless steel. With a single swoop of her arm she explained decades of advancement.
“When we think of wine we think of a delicious beverage that we drink at parties, but early in our history wine was created for communion – to be consumed in mass. No one was trying to produce the highest quality because to God, it was all the same,” said Cynthia. “Wine had a lot of contact with leather, oxygen, feet, and water, it was a much different level of quality than what we know wine to be today.”
But that’s the whole idea, to stand in the midst of Mendoza’s heritage and feel a little fascinated. It’s impossible to leave Bodega La Rural without a newfound appreciation for how Mendoza has gone from humble beginnings to producing world quality wines, in just a century’s time.
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