With two days left in our Chilean excursion, we began Thursday with a visit to Jumbo, a supermarket in the Las Condes section of Santiago. After our visit, I remarked that Walmart needs to rethink its use of the term “supercenter.” This store, known as a “hipermercado,” is the largest food store in Chile. It sports 67 checkout lines.
Our tour guide for the morning, Carolina (she also showed us around Santiago on our first day in Chile), explained that hipermercados are popular as places Chileans can go to get foreign foods like peanut butter that regular markets don’t sell. I can’t name everything that Jumbo sells—there was a large area where non-food items were sold—because we all made a beeline for the produce section. We found an impressive array of fruits and vegetables, including a small organic section and a “gourmet” section. (That’s where they sell the kind of fruit that typically gets exported to the U.S., Europe and Asia.)
I was equally impressed by the sections in the rear of the store where fresh meat, fish and seafood, deli meat and cheeses are sold. Interestingly, the employees in the deli and cheese sections wore what looked like Tyrolean costumes, complete with lederhosen and felt caps. I imagine it hearkens back to the German immigration that occurred in the middle part of the 19th century.
One customer service note: after our olive oil tasting earlier in the week, I was determined to bring home some of the Picual olive oil I enjoyed. So Bob Okura, the chef from Cheesecake Factory who was on the tour, and I headed for the aisle where the oils were sold. As we searched through the rows of olive oil, we were approached by two employees who, apparently, were positioned in the area simply for the purpose of helping customers.
One of them asked, in halting English, what we were looking for. I showed him the bottle I had just picked up, and he pointed down the row to another brand of the same variety. He showed me on the bottle two symbols saying this olive oil had won two awards. Bonus: it was actually a few Chilean pesos cheaper than the bottle I had selected.
After our all-too-brief shopping trip, we headed north of Santiago to the town of San Felipe. First, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant called La Ruca, a rustic establishment that I later discovered is attached to a bed-and-breakfast inn that is popular with vacationers wh come to the area to ski.
We were there for one reason: to try pastel de choclo—corn pie—the national dish of Chile. Served in a deep earthenware bowl, pastel de choclo is made up of a mixture of beef, chicken (on the bone) onions, olives, raisins and/or other items, topped with a thick layer of creamed corn and baked in an oven. It was delicious, although I thought the corn layer was too sweet to be as thick as the layer was.
After filling our bellies, we took off for the David del Curto farm, where table grapes were being harvested. We saw rows and rows of Thomson seedless, Red Flame seedless and Red Globe grape vines, and watched as workers carefully clipped bunches from the vines, pruned them of “bad” grapes and packed them in boxes for the trip to the packing shed. We finished the day at the packing facility, witnessing the quality control process that goes on as employees prepare the grapes for shipment overseas.
On our last day in Chile, we headed west to Valparaiso, Chile’s largest port city. A city that resembles San Francisco with its hills rising away from the bay, Valparaiso is designated a national monument by the Chilean government.
We got a chance to see how longshoremen load the giant container ships with everything from food to machinery. It is an amazingly well-synchronized procedure, one that the port’s manager explained takes two days to choreograph. Trucks moved through the facility on cue in an seemingly endless stream, and cranes lifted the containers off their beds and hoisted them onto the ships.
The cranes, which cost about $800,000 a piece, have transformed a loading process that once required several days into one that is accomplished in hours. That, ironically, is both good and bad for the Valparaiso economy. The bad news is that sailors who used to get three or four days’ shore leave now may not even leave the ship, so fast is the turnaround.
We took a brief respite to climb a hill leading to the Chilean Military Museum and an open-air market, where we could load up on Chilean-made clothing, jewelry and trinkets for the folks back home. Then it was on to Casablanca and the Viña Indomita winery for a tour, wine-tasting and lunch.
In all, it was a busy, exhausting and informative week. My thanks to the Chilean Fresh Fruit Association for the invite, to all the people who worked behind the scenes to organize the trip, and to my boss, Bill Anderson, for allowing me to make the journey.
Next: Final impressions.