We decided to start our Bolivian tour from the South and make our way up, so we took a flight from La Paz to Tarija. Tarija is mainly know for its wine (and doesn't have much in the way of touristy stuff beyond that) so after a quick wander around the city, we decided to take a wine tour.
The wine tour started with a visit to the Kohlberg industrial wine facility where we saw the machinery involved in making and bottling wine. We then drove out to the country for our first wine tasting at the Kohlberg estate, where the company was started and the grapes are grown. Strangely, the wine tastings here operate a little differently than what we are used to at other wineries in North America / Europe - our guide actually brought his own bottle of Kohlberg wine from Tarija to the Kohlberg vineyard where he opened it for us to taste…
The Bolivian wines are generally more fruity and sweet tasting (apparently because most Bolivians prefer sweet wine and none of the Bolivian wines are exported except Kohlberg, and even they export very little). We then went to Las Duelas (a small shop that offers local wine-related products), where we tasted our second wine - a sweet white Muscat.
On our way from the Kohlberg vineyard to Las Duelas, we stopped by Cañon de la Angostura. According to our guide, Tarija and the surrounding area used to be covered by water. At some point an earthquake caused this canyon to open up so the water ran out leaving us with what is now the fertile region of Tarija and the Bolivian Wine Country.
Lastly, we visited one of the first wineries in the region, La Casa Vieja - an artesianal winery where they still make wine the old-fashioned way (ie. by stepping on the grapes). Here we tasted 2 dry wines, 3 sweet wines, and a local grape-based hard liquor called Singani (the Bolivian equivalent to Pisco). The wine-tasting tradition at this vineyard is to only use 1 glass per wine, and share it amongst all of the tasters.
We enjoyed the sweet wines at La Casa Vieja so much that we asked to buy a couple of bottles. Being an artesianal handmade wine, we expected that it might cost a bit more.. to our surprise we picked up 2 bottles for only 50 Bolivianos (~7usd)! Yum!!
In the afternoon, our tour took us for a quick visit of some other sites in the Tarija region. We visited a man-made dam in San Jacinto, the waterfall of Coimata, and a small village called San Lorenzo. We where happy that we booked a tour to see these sites as they were fairly far, and.. not that interesting. Overall, we still enjoyed the afternoon part of the tour - the best part was tasting the local sweet empanadas and peach juice in the small San Lorenzo mercado (market).
