Belasco de Baquedano — Attraction in Mendoza

I had an incredible time at Belasco de Baquedano with their 5 course lunch. Each dish is paired with a wine from Malbec grapes, and you get exquisite views of the vineyard with beautiful seating both indoors and outdoors. I don’t have experience eating at vineyards, and haven’t been to others in the mendoza area, so I can’t speak to how this one compared to others, but the quality of food at this restaurant greatly surpassed similarly priced restaurants I visited in BA. I also loved that this winery in particular was filled with locals, I spoke with a group who came from vacation from BA and they seemed to love Belasco also (and they loved the wines so much at lunch that they bought some to take home, even though they’d already visited many wineries during their week in Mendoza).

I went wine tasting in Norton winery close by (which I loved), so it’s possible I was predisposed to have favorable opinions due to coming a bit tipsy. If you’re coming from the states, make sure to have cash on you, because the dollar is really strong in Argentina right now because of how bad inflation is here, and the conversion rate is much better with cash currency exchange than paying with a credit card.

I might not have the descriptions completely correct for what I had (I can’t find the menu online), but here were the delicious dishes I had here:

eggplant dip with sparkling wine and gluten free bread (made with chickpea flour) and local olive oil. 🍞 I’m not gluten free, they just give gluten free bread to everyone, and it was surprisingly wonderful! I love eggplant and thought this was a wonderful dish.

Hummus salad with fresh cheese, vegetables and crispy garbanzo beans with 18 month oak aged malbec 🥗. Salad was incredibly fresh and a beautiful blend of flavors and textures, definitely my favorite course, even though this is clearly not Argentinian.

Trout with a crispy potato latke and creamy sauce with a 100 year old aged malbec 🐟. This trout was also wonderful, I loved the sauce and the potato was fried to a crispy perfection

Handmade pasta with mushrooms, spinach and broccoli (I’m a pescatarian, but you could have gotten meat for this course for the same price)! I didn’t think this was a great dish, but was my only option as a pescatarian for this course. Served with a one year old Malbec (this one was my favorite wine I had) 🍝

Flan like dessert with dulce (obvi) merengue and a malbec sauce, served with port wine made from Malbec grapes 🍇 . Delicious! Loved both the dessert and port wine.

This was an exquisite meal with a GORGEOUS view, and seemed to be an amazing price for what was received. Come hungry and ready to drink a ton of wine! I was passed out in the afternoon from all of the wine and food, but it was so worth it.

Service was also great, just a heads up that they charge you for water here (this hasn’t been the case in other restaurants I’ve...

Gorgeous winery! They have an interesting tour area, which is essentially a large room filled with several dozen aromas that can be found in wines, and an explanation of each. These range from what you would expect (pepper, citrus, etc.) to some more unusual (e.g. sulphur). They also offer what looked like a very lovely 5 course meal with wine pairings for AR$950/person - the chef for the restaurant has another restaurant with a Michelin star. We did not try the meal so I can't comment on whether it was good or not, but I did notice they had a vegetarian option that would be suitable for pescetarians (it replaced the beef course with a vegetarian course, but there was still a salmon course either way).

We did the 5 wine tasting and found it quite lovely. The 2013 Torrontes (called Rosa) and the 2011 Malbec (called Guentota) were two standouts. The woman who gave us the tasting was wonderful - extremely polite and friendly and quite knowledgeable about the wines. Each wine's name has an interesting backstory which was fun to hear about as well. The real standout wine was the Antracita, which is a red made from frozen grapes that tasted like nothing else we'd had before! It was sweet, but I'm not typically a fan of sweet wines, and loved it. There was no added sugar so it felt light and not sugary. We had promised ourselves we weren't going to buy any bottles to bring back to the states, but they don't export the Antracita (they export all the others through a company in the US), so we caved and bought a bottle, the only one we bought in Argentina. While we were waiting for our taxi the woman who had given us our tasting even gave us another glass of the Antracita for free, which was very kind.

In summary, beautiful winery, food by a Michelin-starred chef, and don't miss...

I would not host any event here.

We were supposed to get married here. We live in Australia. After remote research, put close to a 600 USD deposit down site unseen. We wanted a specific date for our international wedding (I’m from the US, wife Argentina, but we live in Australia).

We fly from Australia to Mendoza to primarily visit this winery and to figure out wedding details. We have a scheduled visit after 20 hours+ of flying.

They didn’t realize we were there to do wedding planning. That could have been the fault of our wedding planner. No one from the winery seemed to care to answer any of our questions. We asked to try some food and we were told to come back in a few days.

While the rooftop has a great view, the rest of the winery is dated and lacks maintenance. It just looks “worn out”. Pictures to prove it. Not exactly what we wanted for our international wedding.

We asked to get our deposit back. “We’ll have to talk to the owners and get back to you”. Didn’t hear back. We then tried to do another event there for our wedding to use the deposit and they wouldn’t make it work. In the end, they just ignored giving us our deposit back.

It’s a high volume winery that sells a lot of wine, it shows they simply don’t put effort into hosting events.

With so many fantastic wineries in the region, go elsewhere. We did. We had an amazing wedding at...