Life in Culebrón

We all know about wine tasting. Spit or swallow. You may have temporarily forgotten but, if you're mature and British, you'll know the wine tasting competition in Tales of Terror with Peter Lorre and Vincent Price. If it temporarily escapes your memory then YouTube remembers it. Maggie, who I live with, appreciates wine. One of her many cultural endeavours is visiting bodegas (wineries). She makes me go along even though I'm more beer and brandy man myself - apart, not shaken or stirred Mr Bond. The normal routine is that you pay for a bodega visit and see a few vines, some steel tanks, some big rubber hoses, some oak barrels and, finally, the wine tasting. That's the bit most people, except the designated driver, like best. You get to drink three or four or five glasses of wine from the bodega, usually with a bit of ham and cheese to nibble. There are lots of variations and each of the wineries tends to have a different emphasis. The quality of the explanation and what...

I find it vaguely amusing how the Italians seem to get there first. Here the tiny strong black coffee is called a solo but buy one in Teignmouth in Devon or Alberona in Foggia and it'll be an espresso. Expensive British coffees have Italian names. Another example is Spanish ham, the Jamón Serrano. Commonplace here but, when I want to describe it to visiting Britons, I find that I need to describe it as Parma ham so they know what I'm talking about. Spaniards by the way call the British floppy boiled ham York Ham - jamón York. Spaniards are often particularly narked about oil. Oil in Spain means olive oil. The default is olive oil. If, for some strange reason, you want another type of oil then you have to be specific - corn oil, sesame oil etc. Even if the Mediterranean Diet is besieged on all sides by hamburgers, pizzas and kebabs the oil is still an essential part of the Spanish diet. Obviously enough it's easy to buy Spanish oil here but it's not difficult to ...