Doing work, son.

First off: my computer keeps "blue screen of death-ing" me, so I'm going to apologize in advance for the lack of pictures in this and possible future posts. My laptop is limping along in safe mode, so I'm effectively bringing a knife to this technology gunfight. 

But I went on my first wine vineyard interview Friday. I left Viña at 6 am, took a bus to Santiago, and took the metro to the nice part of downtown Santiago. All by myself. Las Condes, the aforementioned nice part of Santiago, is really impressive. I felt like I could easily be in downtown Chicago or Dallas or somewhere like that. Of course, there's both good and bad to this--it's a little boring, but also good for the overall perception of a city and all that. Downside of modernization, I guess. 

I met the PR director for Almavia at a Starbucks in Las Condes, and she gave me a ride to the vineyard, about 45 minutes south of Santiago. Almaviva is a partnership between Chilean Concha y Toro and Rothschild from France, and it is their attempt to make the finest wine in Chile. I was lucky enough to get a private tour of the vineyards and a tasting. Got to say, drinking a glass of $150 wine on a balcony overlooking vineyards and the Andes at 11 in the morning is a pretty easy way to live. My interview, with the head of US sales and the overall sales manager, went really well. They had great answers to all of my questions, and for some inexplicable reason my Spanish was on fire (or enfuego, as we like to say down here.) 

Also, friends and family, I went to the vineyards with full intention of buying bottles and shipping them back to some people. I couldn't afford to do it, and I felt like my family's excitement at getting gifts wouldn't be enough to outweigh their anger at their son spending a thousand dollars to send a case of alcohol to another continent. I'll just add it to my post lottery win to-do list.