Peru produces a very particular type of grape that is super sweet. They only grow in the Ica region, which is mostly desert and very dry. So, as you can guess, a lot of Peruvian wine is very sweet. My favorites are the semi-seco rosés, which taste almost like port, but have a much lighter texture. Think summer evening after a meal on the deck.
From what I could gather at our last visits to the Cantador bodega, Peruvian wine is actually a mixture of pisco (an alcohol made from grapes) and grape juice. Pisco is the most important product made with the grapes, potentially because there is a higher demand for it’s export. Vino seems to be somewhat of an afterthought.
We’ve been toting around three bottles (2 wine, 1 cream pisco) from our last visit to the bodegas with Jeremy and Autumn. In an effort to lighten our load, we wanted to open a bottle of wine last night, but didn’t have an opener. Our hotel didn’t have an opener. There were no openers for sale at any of the food stands in town…
We were stuck resorting to the “Venice Method”, where Scott finds a wood screw somewhere in our hotel room, and uses that and the pliers on his knife to pry open the bottle. (We first did this one late night in Venice, Italy about 6 years ago.)
