Wine tasting in Spain: Notes from a winery
Given the gallons of wine I have consumed while in Spain, it is only natural to end my trip with a wine tasting in Spain.
Spain is the third largest wine producing country in the world and that reflects well through Spanish gastronomy. No meal in Spain is taken without wine. In Spanish restaurants, both red and white wine always make it to the table simultaneously. In a tiny village in Castile y Leon region, at the Bodegas Zarraguilla winery, I find the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of this beverage’s production.
Is this a video game (think Witcher)? Is this a fantasy novel (think GoT)? The vibe seems hardly real, and far from 21st century. The wooden décor, rust-laden rural metal tools, the firebrick oven and the squeals of unpretentious laughter rolling from one wall to the other disorient me for a while. This European village restaurant is straight out of Winterfell.
Wood-baked lamb is a specialty of the restaurant. On national holidays and weekends, people from the nearby villages and cities, including Madrid, flock to dine with their friends and families here. Being present on a long weekend, I do sample this crowd. I am so thankful the owner of the restaurant still agrees to show us around.
Touring the Zarraguilla winery
He takes us down inside the musty cellars of Zarraguilla. This is where the magic beverage is brewed. The first thing I notice here are tubs full of grapes. And on them sit flies, intoxicated—that’s what I think, anyway. The owner notices my chuckle and confirms my guess. These flies are indeed drunk!
Next, we move on to the outdoor facility with modern machinery that help in mass crushing and grinding the grapes. Huge steel barrels for fermenting are connected by a network of pipes to other barrels where the oxygen is sucked out. In the next dark, damp room, I see a collection of barrels, bottles, pipes and frothy liquid co-existing.
The most recognizable image of a winery is an image of sleeping wines in oak barrels—the cellars. Freshly made Zarraguilla wine is poured into these wooden barrels and left undisturbed for years. The older the wine, the better it tastes. Hundreds of these barrels clutter the room. We engage in photo-sessions as the owner patiently waits for us to finish.
I had the wrong idea that fermentation in the wooden barrels is the last stage of wine making. Among thousands of horizontally laid glass bottles of wine, I stand corrected. Oak fermented wines are packed into corked glass bottles but are made to rest again in these bottles for years; only after this, they hit the store-shelves.
In this room, where wine sleeps in bottles, there is also a cork-fixing machine. The owner gives us a live demo by fixing a cork to a wine bottle. Here he explains to us several jargons of the wine world. Once done with the tour, the owner invites us upstairs for a tasting session.
Anecdotes from wine tasting in Spain
The crowd in the restaurant increases manifold as afternoon spins into evening. Zarraguilla, in business for a century, is a family venture. Some of the other members of the family quickly pass greetings while catering to the guests. Soon, our glasses of red wine arrive and I take the first sip.
Miguel (can’t stress enough how extremely common this name is in Spain), our driver, must have noticed my expression. He immediately picks up his glass and carefully swirls it, just enough to make the wine reach the glass edge without spilling outside. He says strong wines such as this one are easy on the throat if consumed after swirling.
I learn another fun fact here. The tears of wine, also called wine legs that form on the surface of the glass after shaking the wine can tell the alcohol and sugar content of the beverage. My glass has a lot of tears, which indicates high alcohol content. Sure enough, the wine I am tasting has a whopping 16% alcohol content. The slower the movement of the tears, the higher the sugar content. Well, the wine legs in my glass move fast.
The wine I consume at Zarraguilla, worth €7 a bottle, is the strongest one I have had during the entire duration of my Spain trip. As one of my companions goes on a prowl in the village to buy a stronger, rarer wine from a satellite cellar of Zarraguilla, sip by sip I recount all the fantastic experiences on this trip— courtesy Spain!
Have you been to any winery anywhere in the world? Would you like to go for wine tasting in Spain? Feel free to share your experiences!
*****
Disclaimer: Tania was hosted by Spain Tourism Board. All thoughts and opinions expressed in the post are of her own.
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Tania Banerjee
Tania is a freelance writer based in India who tinkers with words here and there but mostly focused on travel, food, arts and crafts. She writes for several Indian dailies and magazines.
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