Argentina is a country becoming more well-known for its wines. The most common variety is malbec. It is a French grape from the Bordeaux region that grows very well in some South American regions. I’ll show you my wine expertise in one sentence: Malbec is a tasty wine with a dark red color and a dirt-cheap price.If you want to know about tannins, legs, nose or any other body parts of wine, then you came to the wrong place. I buy beverages to drink them, not sip them, stare at them and then smell them.

I like wine as much as the next person, but Buenos Aires has more to offer in the realm of drinks.

The beer here is . different. I am a bit of a beer-snob, so what I lack in “wine-tasting vocabulary” I can more than make up for with the much less eloquent “beer-drinking vocabulary.”

Quilmes is the most popular beer in Argentina. It tastes surprisingly similar to the “king of beers” or another cheaper American lager.

Schneider is very similar but maybe with a bit more flavor. Brahma is from Brazil and tastes like bad breath and grass clippings.

Once, I bought a bottle of Quilmes red lager. The company is trying different styles in the same way that beer producers in North America have been doing for a few years.

It tasted so bad that I bought another bottle just to make sure that they were all like that. It was so bad that I wanted to wash the taste out of my mouth with some “bad-breath-brahma.”

I gave a more passionate description to a family member but the details of that conversation are not fit for print.

The most interesting drink in Argentina is a tea made from the yerba mate plant.

The leaves of the plant are put into a gourd with a bombilla, which acts as a kind of straw/filter, is used to drink the mate. (pronounced “ma-tay”)

Argentines bring it everywhere with them. It seems to be the ultimate way to form social bonds here. They sit in circles and pass a few mate gourds around while they tell stories.

I haven’t had any mate because I don’t drink caffeine and it has quite a bit, but people that like it describe the flavor as being close to a bitter, earthy tea with a hint of eucalyptus.

People that don’t like it describe the flavor as a bitter, earthy tea with a hint of Vick’s VapoRub.

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