Al Este

Coordinates: 38°48′S 62°41′W / 38.800°S 62.683°W / -38.800; -62.683

Al Este Bodega y Viñedos is a winery in Médanos, Buenos Aires, Argentina. It consists of vineyards (in owned lands that exceed 300 hectares (740 acres)) and an adjacent winery, located 640 km (400 mi) south of the city of Buenos Aires on the southern tip of the Buenos Aires province. The project has been developed under the direction of the Italian wine maker Alberto Antonini.

In its first submission to a wine contest, Al Este was awarded a Silver Medal in the White Wine category in the 2009 Decanter World Wine Awards, the world's largest wine contest, celebrated in London. Al Este's award-winning wine is recommended by Decanter in sixth position as one of the top chardonnays in 2009.

History

In the early 20th century several European immigrants arrived to Médanos and brought the wine making tradition with them. Although at some point a multitude of small growers planted a combined surface of approximately 200 hectares of vineyards, they were unable to successfully complete the wine making process given lack of scale, inadequate technology and the country’s ups and downs which lead to their disappearance.

Mir

Mir (Russian: Мир, IPA: [ˈmʲir]; lit. Peace [homonym: world]) was a space station that operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, owned by the Soviet Union and later by Russia. Mir was the first modular space station and was assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996. It had a greater mass than any previous spacecraft. Until 21 March 2001 it was the largest artificial satellite in orbit, succeeded by the International Space Station after Mir's orbit decayed. The station served as a microgravity research laboratory in which crews conducted experiments in biology, human biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology and spacecraft systems with a goal of developing technologies required for permanent occupation of space.

Mir was the first continuously inhabited long-term research station in orbit and held the record for the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days until 23 October 2010 when it was surpassed by the ISS. It holds the record for the longest single human spaceflight, with Valeri Polyakov spending 437 days and 18 hours on the station between 1994 and 1995. Mir was occupied for a total of twelve and a half years out of its fifteen-year lifespan, having the capacity to support a resident crew of three, or larger crews for short visits.

Miré

Miré is a commune in the Maine-et-Loire department in western France.

See also

References

Mir (title)

Mir (مير) (is a title which is derived from the Arabic title Emir). It is an aristocratic title generally used to refer to a person who is a descendant of a commander in medieval Muslim tradition.

It was adopted in many languages under Islamic influence, such as Balochi, Ottoman Turkish,Persian, Turkish, Pashto, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Sindhi and Bengali meaning leader of a group or tribe. According to the book Persian Inscriptions on Indian Monuments, Mir is most probably an Arabized form of Pir. Pir in Old Persian and Sanskrit means the old, the wise man, the chief and the great leader. It was Arabized as Mir then, with Al(A) (Arabic definite article), it was pronounced as Amir.

Title

Mir was also subsequently used as an honor rank. (See: Mirza).

Amongst Muslims, mir/meer has become an interchangeable synonym of sayyid (or syed), meaning "relative of prophet Muhammad".

(The last name Mirpourian is a present day example of sayyid, a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad.)

In Muslim princely states very few formal mirs have actually reached the level of salute state, notably in present Pakistan, where only two of the six have been entitled to a gun salute and the attached His Highness. The highest-ranking are the Amir of Bahawalpur), the Mir of Khairpur (17 guns) and the Mir of Hunza (15 guns).