The Wine Traveler Looks Back at Spain

We are back in the good old USA after a fabulous four-week adventure in Spain. We would like to return again to experience more of the Spanish lifestyle and their wonderful food and wine. We have learned much on this trip and this will surely help us on our next Spanish adventure.

The wine region of La Rioja is one area where we would love to spend more time. We would spend at least three full days there, and stay in one of the small La Rioja towns. We missed out on the tour and tasting at the amazing Bodega Marques de Riscal. We would love to tour the inside of the Bodega Ysios (Photo).

While in Barcelona we did manage a 45-minute train trip to the Cava town of Sant Sadurni and a tour at Freixnet, but there is much more to explore near Barcelona than Cava. The D.O. of Priorat and Penedes are nearby with much to explore there.

During our trip we rented an apartment with friends in both Madrid and San Sebastian. We found this to be a plus for several reasons. In our apartment we were able to eat a healthy breakfast in and prepare a small dinner. We usually made our lunch at a restaurant our main meal of the day.

Having a car is a must if you are going to explore the small towns and the wineries. We soon discovered we should have rented a car with a G.P.S. system. Although we had detailed Google maps, we still got lost frequently. What good are street maps if you cannot find the street signs, or when you find the street you see that it’s closed to vehicles?

As far as guidebooks, we found the Rough Guide to be the most useful. Frommer’s was also good. The Rough Guide had valuable information on many of the smaller towns not listed in the other guidebooks. They also have a very useful section on wine and that is how we discovered the wine museum in Briones.

We found the following books very useful and studied them for months to plan the itinerary of our trip:

“Discovering Spain, An Uncommon Guide,” by Penelope Casas
“Let’s Open a Bottle, My Journey through the Spanish Wine Revolution,” by Brian Murdock
“The New Spain, A Complete Guide to Contemporary Spanish Wine,” by John Radford

“My Maps” is a new Google feature and we found it to be immensely helpful in plotting potential places to visit. You put in the address you want, a pinpoint shows the spot on the map, and you can add a description and save it to your map of Spain. It is a great planning tool.

Finally, that dollar of ours!

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Wine Traveler Visits Cavas Freixenet

Cava is what Spain calls its sparkling wine. The Cava region is just south of Barcelona. We decided on our last day in Spain to visit at least one winery in this region. It is a very easy 45-minute train trip from Placa de Catalunya station to the train stop in the town of Sant Sadurni d’Anoia.

There are two big bodegas that produce Cava within walking distance of this train stop, Freixenet and Codorniu. We stopped in at Freixenet first because it is directly in front of the train station. Codorniu is about a 20-minute walk away. Here, we are told that both of these bodegas offer wine tours and tasting by appointment only. Fortunately at Freixenet it was a light visitor day, and we were able to book a 12:45 tour in English.

We had time to kill so we walked into the town of Sant Sadurni. What we found was Cava land. It seems that this tiny town is all about Cava. It bills itself as the “Capital del Cava.” Each year the town celebrates the Cava harvest with various festivities. There are banners hanging from high street lights advertising the celebration that runs from September 26 to October 14. The town is so into Cava that even its metal auto barriers are in the shape of Champagne corks. As we walked the town streets, we found several small bodegas that produce Cava.

The Freixenet winery is the leading exporter of Cava wine in Spain. Each year they ship millions of bottles of their sparkling wine throughout the world and much of it to the U.S. The tour is one and a half hours long and includes a ride on a trolley that takes us throughout the mammoth facility. The winery has a storage capacity of one hundred eighty million bottles. Just imagine how much space that requires. The tour concludes in their beautiful tasting room where we are able to sample the Freixenet Brut. Freixenet also has a huge merchandise and wine shop. The only things that we’re willing to carry home are a mouse pad and a serving tray.

On a side note, one of the four current family owners is Gloria Ferrer, who also happens to own the Gloria Ferrer Winery in Sonoma County’s Carneros wine region.

We wish we had more time to visit one of the other cava producers and explore the surrounding vineyards of this area, but tomorrow it is time to head home. We definitely would’ve visited Bodega Torres, another two train stops away. We have enjoyed our visits to Marimar Torres in the Russian River Valley, owned by a family member of owners of Bodega Torres.

Our trip to Spain has been a wonderful experience. We will definitely be shopping for Spanish wines to add to our cellar and regular consumption.

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Wine Traveler in Barcelona

Barcelona is the last leg of our four-week trip to Spain. We are staying at the Hotel Montecarlo located on one of the busiest streets in the world, La Rambla. Getting to Barcelona was easier than we expected. From San Sebastian we returned our car at the San Sebastian airport and hopped on a turbo jet to Barcelona. From the airport it is a 20-minute bus ride to the Placa Catalunya and then about a quarter mile walk with bags to the Hotel Montecarlo.

This is by far the most cosmopolitan city we have visited in Spain. There are tourists from all over the world. There is a constant stream of people on La Rambla and side streets. In the Barrio Gothic there are many narrow streets that intertwine and provide a great adventure.

Barcelona is all about food, wine, cerveza, sangria, and socializing. Half the fun is eating and drinking in Barcelona. Tapas, Tapas, Tapas! You can stop at one of the many tapas bars and order three small dishes for a set Euro price that is quite reasonable. A very nice tapas lunch with a cerveza or cupa de vino is under 10 Euros at most regular tapas joints. If you are not having tapas, then it has to be a very filling dinner of one of the seven types of Paella that are served in Barcelona.

Along La Rambla there is a center walkway where numerous street performers work. Many had very innovative trades. We were quite amused by an older fellow who obviously was at one point in his life, a fantastic soccer player. He entertained the youngsters with various soccer tricks that were quite amazing. We were surprised at the money these people are making at this trade.

On Sunday morning we were delighted to come upon some of the locals in the Placa de La Seu, joining hands in a circle and dancing a local folk dance to the music of about 5 musicians sitting in front of the Cathedral Santa Lucia. We then followed a local marching band, which led priests and altar boys through the narrow streets. We ended up in a plaza near the City Hall which was filled with boisterous protesters appearing to be
supporters of a separate Catalan state. Quite a morning!

We have been to Barcelona before so we are skipping the usual tourist attractions this time around. We are just going to spend time walking, eating, and enjoying good vino. By the way, we discovered a white wine from La Rioja that may be our favorite yet. It is made from the grape Viura. We had a bottle of this wine from the Bodega Conde de Valdemar. We hope this wine is available at home.

Tomorrow, we are taking a short 40-minute-train ride to the nearby Cava town of
Sant Sadurni d’Anoia.

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The Wine Traveler Visits the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao

A couple of blog posts back, we wrote about our visit to the Bodegas Marques de Riscal designed by Frank Gehry. We mentioned the word “gaudy” and suggested we did not care for the design of the Bodega. We have to admit that was a very premature judgment. After all, we did not see the bodega close up and were only able to view the top portion of the building.

After visiting the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao we have a much different opinion of the works of Frank Gehry. The Guggenheim in Bilbao is mesmerizing. The more you gaze at the structure, the more you are drawn to it. The titanium façade and various forms and shapes are almost hypnotic. Somehow Gehry’s ultra modern design fits perfectly into the landscape of the city. It is fascinating, astonishing, and beautiful.

Not only is the outside a wonder, so is the inside. Even though our visit was limited to the first floor (the other two floors were closed due to some unknown project), we viewed unusual supports, structures. and walls that were startling. The building is so amazing and interesting that art exhibits themselves are secondary. If the entire museum had been open, it would’ve been worth a whole day’s visit. There is a store, a café, and a classy restaurant for a rest or lunch break.

We chose to dine in the upscale Kursaal Restaurant in the Guggenheim. All our guidebooks rave about this restaurant. The décor is fabulous, the service impeccable. Too bad the meal did not match. We spent 300 Euros for the six of us for a lunch that was very inconsistent. We were disappointed. Maybe it is because we live in such a fabulous mecca for restaurants in the S.F. Bay area, but no meal in Spain has yet to “knock our socks off.”

Our advice is not to try to drive to or into Bilbao by car. There are buses that leave every half hour from San Sebastian, and they are the easiest way to get there. The trip is worth it for the Guggenheim; otherwise, as far as we could see, Bilbao has little to recommend itself to the traveler.

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The Wine Traveler in San Sebastian

We have arrived in the northeast city of San Sebastian/Donostia. Since San Sebastian is in Basque country, like all city names, it has its Spanish version and its Basque version (Donostia). We have rented a four-bedroom apartment with easy access to the beach and the old part of town. Our apartment has a full kitchen and a comfortable living room. We will be spending four full days here relaxing and dining. The weather is not the greatest with days partly cloudy and some rain. The temperature is in the 70’s and it is quite humid.

The main attractions in San Sebastian are the bay and its beach. This is vacationland for many Spaniards who come from southern Spain to escape the summer heat. It first became popular when the Spanish queen took her summers here in the late 1800’s. Her summer palace here has been converted into City Hall. The beach view from our rooftop patio is magnificent.

Within easy walking distance of our apartment we find a huge supermercado where we can buy all we need for breakfast, appetizers, and a nice variety of wine. We find panderias, produce markets, and fish and seafood stands where farmers sell their goods.

This part of town is very expensive. The shops are upscale and pricey. With the dollar weak, the price of items is quite expensive. The best deals for us are the food and the wine.

As far as wine, there is a tradition in San Sebastian with their local Txakoli (cha ko’ lee) wine. This wine comes from vineyards in the surrounding Basque land. It is a dry white wine, with slight acidity and a bit of effervescence. The bartenders serve the wine into Txaloli glasses, almost the size of traditional beer glasses. There is a pourer that has a flap on it, and the wine is poured from at least three feet high to further aerate the wine. Very interesting.

Tomorrow we plan to visit the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

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Wine Traveler at Museo De La Cultura Del Vino

In the La Rioja wine town of Briones, Spain, we visited a most amazing and fantastic wine museum and wine cultural center. The museum was created and developed by Bodegas DiNastia Vivanco, a family with a long tradition of winemaking in La Rioja.

It is hard to describe this wine museum unless you have actually been here and gone through the exhibits. It is comprehensive yet not overwhelming. We have nothing like this in the California wine country. We do have Copia in Napa, but this is much much more.

The museum does not focus on Rioja wine, but wine in general. It is a self guided tour that takes the visitors through 6 wine themes and four floors that include the history of wine, how wine is made, works of art depicting wine, and a magnificent collection of corkscrews, serving vessels, wine goblets and glasses. There are several video presentations which are short but brilliant. One of our favorite video exhibits was the time-lapse photography of a year in the vineyards. From bud break to harvest, the year of the vine is presented to the viewer on a collage of screens.

Another favorite exhibit is the wine aroma station. Here the visitor can test their senses for twenty different aromas found in various varietals of wines. We have done this elsewhere, but nowhere did we feel the different aromas were as exact as at this museum.

The tour ends with a degustacion (wine tasting) where we each taste and drink a delicious glass of Rioja wine. This is a very memorable experience, one I will not soon forget.

Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photos inside the museum, so we are unable to show photographs of any of the exhibits. The top photo is the medieval town of Briones, the middle photo, the museum, and the bottom photo, a sculpture outside the museum.

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