We get breakfast in the lounge. This was notable for two
things: good chorizo and bad scrambled eggs, which had sat
so long as to become large hard flat curds in a yellowish
liquid. Also an assortment of ordinary things you'd expect.
There was supposed to be, according to the little signs,
dulce de leche for your toast, so I grabbed a dish of it;
turned out to be a very neutral honey, very dulce but not
leche at all. Oh, a third notable thing - the orange juice
was nasty stuff cut with sweetened water, just like at a
cheap hotel (and unlike the afternoon offering here, which
is real). No big thing, we were supposed to go to a wine
tasting at 11, and snacks were promised.

Marieta Restaurant is a half mile walk through a bustling
noisy part of town, so I led lili down side streets - the
sidewalks tend to be terrible - to our destination, which
is approximately at Avenida de Mayo and 9 de Julio. Don't
believe Google Maps, which has it in the wrong place. We
were shown downstairs to the cellar, where Gaucho had an
elegant setup for us.

We started with the Ruca Malen Brut Sparkling n.v.
(Mendoza), which was a fresh, slightly yeasty, fruity
wine, quite easy to drink, but I didn't find a use for
it (I ended up eating a number of chicken cheese rollups
to go with my glass). Gaucho made a big thing about the
little bubbles. Careful fermentation in the Champagne way
yields this kind of bubbles. Big bubbles are a sign of
bulk process fermentation. Huge short-lived bubbles are a
sign of artificial carbonation, something none of us was
coarse enough to bring up. Maybe Gaucho has never seen such
a terrible thing; I have.

Encuentro Malbec-Cabernet (Mendoza) 11 is a lightish wine
with a heavyish nose. Starts off with black pepper and
brambles and goes on to bright red fruit, which disappointed
some of us. It was halfway between a cheap wine and a good
one.

Escorihuela Gascon Malbec Cabernet (Mendoza) 11 was
introduced to us as the little brother of what we had had
at Sotto Voce. Though a nice quaff, it was lighter in flavor
and less complex. Great with food, and I liked it.

Marcelo Miras Malbec (Patagonia) 11 was the blockbuster of
the session - lots of tannin, complex, ageworthy. I didn't
get a focused impression; the people at one end of the table
were saying one thing about it, and those at the other,
their pours from another bottle of the same label, were in
complete disagreement. So I solicited sniffs of both kinds,
and there was indeed a distinct if perhaps subtle difference
- on consultation, Gaucho suggested that one of the bottles
may have been suffering from a hint of cork taint. That
aside, this is a cellaring wine or maybe at the lower end
of the investment spectrum.

Substantial snacks - those chicken things, potato tortilla,
three cheeses, beef empanadas (I didn't like these as they
were made especially neutral for the wine tasting), maybe
another finger food or two, and bowls of chicken and red
onion marinated in what I thought rather too much vinegar
for the situation.

We excused ourselves from lunch - the nibbles we'd been
served had defeated lili, and so we just went off and did
the hotel switch thing. I'd picked out the Hotel Boutique
Raco in the Almagro neighborhood, which turns out to be a
mix of upper-middle and ordinary middle class homes; ours
was a formerly stately 1904 house with fine turn-of-the-
century fixtures in the main building. We got put in what
I think must have been stables or servants' quarters. We
had our choice of one or both of two rooms near the main
house; we picked the one closest, a smallish but perfectly
adequate space with an exceedingly high ceiling. Modest but
modern and functional bathroom, with actual controllable
water temperature. After a contretemps with the heating
system - it turns out we had not noticed that the remote
control was on air con rather than heat -, we became quite
comfortable.