The day trades the city for the interior — vineyard country first, then the long, spare corridor of the Ruta 40 running south through semi-arid plains toward the volcanic south of Mendoza province. It is a day of contrasts: the manicured elegance of Argentina's most celebrated high-altitude wine valley in the morning, and by afternoon a landscape that owes nothing to cultivation — volcanic cones, basalt plains, and the Andes drawing steadily closer on the right.
Through the Valle de Uco
The day begins with a 10:00 am departure from Mendoza, heading south on the Ruta Provincial 86 into the northern Valle de Uco. The road leaves the city's irrigated grid and runs toward the foothills, where the Andes begin to assert themselves to the west. Within thirty kilometres, the Tupungato massif comes into view: a broad, glacier-draped lava dome rising to 6,570 metres (21,555 feet) on the Chile–Argentina border, with the smaller but still-active Tupungatito shouldered against its southwest flank. The name is Huarpe in origin — tupun-catu, the "star viewpoint" — given by the valley's pre-Columbian inhabitants for the mountain's qualities as an observatory.
The first stop is the town of Tupungato itself, the departmental capital, a working agricultural centre set on the alluvial plain with the Andes visible almost from every street. It is a market town as much as a wine town — garlic, onion, walnut, and potato cultivation fills the flatlands alongside the vines — and its compact centre has a different, quieter register than the wine tourism infrastructure developing to the south.