To get to Mendoza, the capital city of the Argentinean province of the same name and the nerve center of the country’s vast wine region, you first fly to Santiago, Chile. There, you connect with what I generally describe to friends as my favorite flight. The opening minutes are less like takeoff and more like liftoff, as you rocket skyward at an unusually steep pitch. The pilot is making this precipitous climb because the Andes Mountains are dead ahead, and—sorry to mention it—nobody wants to end up like the Uruguayan rugby team that Piers Paul Read wrote about in his 1974 best-seller, Alive.
Soon enough, you’re up there surrounded by crags and snow and cerulean sky; the jagged tips of the highest peaks in the western hemisphere are just within reach outside your porthole. If you’re on the port side, you’ll glimpse Aconcagua, the king of the Andes, at nearly 23,000 feet.
