Whining on, again

I'm not such a big fan of wine. It's not that I don't drink it but I'd nearly always go for other sorts of booze first. Maggie, my partner, on the other hand, is a bit of an enthusiast. One of the things she often does is to take our visitors on one of the bodega tours. Indeed, years ago, she used to organise tours for tourists as a business venture so we got to know nearly all of the bodegas in Jumilla and Yecla and a good number of the bodegas close to Pinoso that allow visits.

Jumilla, Yecla and Alicante all produce wines that have Denominación de Origen Protegida (protected designation of origin) as well as wines more suited to drain unblocking or unarmed combat. Lots of the stuff that isn't D.O.P. is shipped to other countries, particularly France, where it is mixed with local wine and then sold as being from that country. The unloved wine is the sort of wine that you would use for things where any old wine will do - preserving fruits, cooking, turning into vinegar etc. Sometimes it tastes OK and sometimes it doesn't.

D.O.P., often shortened to DO, is a sort of quality mark which says that the product comes from a specific place, and that its characteristics are to do with that geography, with the methods by which it is produced and that there is a process for checking that those standards and rules are maintained and followed. Round here for instance the monastrell grapes grown on the wire trellis for machine picking aren't for DO wine. The good stuff comes from the vines arranged in the rows that make "diamond" shapes and are picked by hand. Wines are often D.O. - that's why we can talk about a rioja or a sherry - but cheese, ham, sausage and even tiger nuts and horchata (the drink made from them) can have D.O. 

I don't know about you but I still think of wines as being quite posh. Expensive restaurants have people who select and serve their wines with the same panache as the servers present those fiddly plates of food. It seems wrong, to me, that this classy product starts with grapes hauled by old tractors in even older trailers and, when those grapes have been mashed up to yield juice, the liquid is moved from one steel tank to another using industrial pumps and thick rubber hoses laid across concrete floors.

I also find the whole wine tasting process at the bodegas a bit false. The normal routine is that you are shown around the unloading bays, the fermenting vats, the cellars where the barrels are stored and the bottling plant before the guide takes you to try the wines - anything from three to five different types - with a bit of ham and cheese to accompany the drink. The company line varies from bodega to bodega. If one adds yeast that produces the best wine if another doesn't, but relies on the natural yeast on the grapes, that's the best. One lauds the steel tanks another their concrete ones. When it comes around to tasting they instruct you on the correct way to hold the glass, how to swirl, the sniffing, the looking at the colour against a white background and so on. In one of the bodegas they suggested that you should use all five senses when tasting wines. Listen how it gloops into the glass. Ahem! They always talk about the colour. I understand that the colour may say something about the time and place that a wine has been stored, or the grape it came from, but so would the label, and more accurately. You are asked to smell the wine. What "notes" do you detect? - peach, strawberry, thyme, chocolate? I often wonder which is best. I usually think it smells of alcohol but if it smelt floral would that be good or bad? 

I once had the temerity to ask why one wine was more expensive than another. I can see, for instance, that wines put in barrels to mature will cost more than wines that are bottled more or less straight away because there is no barrel to buy, there is no energy needed to keep the wine at the right temperature and nobody has to be paid to keep an eye on the maturation but when the harvesting is done by hand, when the storage time and method is the same, when all the variables are the same I don't quite understand why one wine is several times more expensive than another. I didn't get a proper answer.

But, as I said, I don''t much care for wine so maybe I'm just biased and if you've never done a bodega tour I'd definitely recommend one.

Mine's a pint

Spaniards don't care for British beer. They don't like it because of the temperature it is served at. Most use the word broth in their comparison. Spaniards like their beer cold. British style bitter beer isn't easily available in Spain because here, like in most places, beer means bottom fermented rather than top fermented product - lager instead of ale. Obviously, when I moved to Spain I wanted to integrate so I embraced Spanish lager wholeheartedly. It wasn't as hard as cracking the subjunctive because, when I was young, drinking Indian Kingfisher, American Rolling Rock, Italian Peroni, Canadian Labatt, Mexican Dos Equis, and so on and so on, was considered eminently cool. I had prior form.

To my mind most lagers tend to be quite samey. It's not that they taste the same but the standard light, crisp and gassy lagers, like the majority of the Spanish ones have quite a lot in common. That's presumably why most Spaniards, in Spain, don't specify and simply ask for a beer. On the other hand most Britons, in the UK at least, order their beer by name and quantity. Being a bit contrary I seem to prefer the less usual varieties of lager, the dark ones like Modelo Negra or Tres Equis for instance and the blonder ones like Hoegaarden. So, a few years ago, when craft beers started to become much more available in Spain I thought of it as being a bit like that real ale surge in the UK in the 1970s and 80s. At that time in the UK the big brewers generally abandoned the mass produced fizz and tried to produce a more traditional product. In turn that gave space in the market for the traditional brewers at the same time as providing an opening for the new small scale producers. So when the big Spanish brewers, Heineken, Mahou-San Miguel and Damm, started to add to their ranges - an IPA here, a double hopped there, maybe a Dunkel or a toasted beer - then, all at once, having a Spanish beer involved a little more choice. There were also, suddenly, inevitably, local craft Spanish beers - often with terrible copies of beers like stouts and IPA - but at least there was an option. Nowadays Spanish supermarkets offer a cornucopia of different beers.

The other week we went on a visit to the Estrella de Levante brewery in Espinardo on the outskirts of Murcia city. Estrella is owned by the Damm group. I have no idea how I've missed this trip for so long because it seems that they've been doing tours since 2013. One of the big advantages for me is that the brewery is on the tram line. I arranged the day so that I could enjoy the lunchtime tasting session and then use the tram to go to the town centre for a concert. By the time the band finished I was alcohol free for the drive home.

To be honest the factory tour was less than overwhelming. Malting rooms are always semi interesting but bottom fermentation, with sealed tanks, doesn't leave much to look at and bottling and canning plants are hardly spellbinding. The tasting though was really well done.

The tasting room at Estrella de Levante was refurbished at the end of last year. My guess is that the tours were halted becase of Covid and, during the pandemic, the company took advantage of the lull and rebuilt the room. As it's new it still looks very stylish as well as being clean and tidy. We all sat at long tables with a sort of big place mat in front of us. On each mat there was a space for the glass and a space to grade, using a scale provided by them, or comment on, the four beers we were offered. Any primary school teacher would be able to produce something similar but it did add a touch of audience participation to the beer tasting. We had also paid the extra to get the maridaje, the marriage or pairing up, of little snacks, tapas, to go with each beer. The tapas were really good.

As I said there were four beers - the standard Estrella de Levante lager, Verna which is their beer spiked with lemon juice (a bit shandy like), Punta Este which is a lager with extra toasted malt and a wheat beer which is new for them and which isn't yet listed on their website. As we tasted we were offered refills of everything. For the first beer, the standard lager, lots of people asked for refills. Nobody asked for a refill on the shandy stuff and nobody asked for a refill on the wheat beer (except me). Only two or three people (again I was one of them) asked for refills on the toasted lager. 

As everyone in the room, us apart, was Spanish I drew a conclusion from that session. I decided that Spaniards like their beer to taste like the beer they know. It's hardly detailed market research but it does explain why, when I'm in a bar, and I ask if they have any interesting beers the servers never know what I'm talking about. I have to explain that I'm keen to try a beer that isn't a run of the mill lager - de toda la vida - like always. I might think that a double hopped unfiltered beer is interesting but, apparently, to your average Spaniard, that would be inferior to normal lager. As long as both are cold of course!

And just how do you get to be extra virgin?

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 buy Italian oil. What upsets Spaniards is that they believe, and it's true, that lots of the oil sold as Italian is actually produced in Spain. Spain produces about 45% of the World's olive oil and Italy about 20% but, again, Italian oil has a much better reputation than Spanish oil so the Italians can sell more than they produce. To meet demand the Italians buy olive oil from other places and bottle it up as Italian. I should say that the saffron producers of Novelda do much the same with product from Iran but I'm Spanish nowadays so we'll have none of that disloyalty.

We have an oil mill, an almazara, in our village, in Culebrón. From sometime in November through to as late as January lots of local producers, from Britons and Dutch residents with baskets of a few kilos of olive through to local farmers with trailer-loads of fruit, queue up to sell their olives to the mill. Watching the process it all looks very straightforward. Onto conveyors, through presses and into bottles. The oil from Culebrón isn't sold in nice bottles with nice labels. It's sold in big five litre plastic bottles with a very basic label. The last time I looked it wasn't even labelled as extra virgin (that's the one that's just cold pressed fruit) and I'm sure it would be if it were so there must be either second press or processed oil added. It is, though, a good product at a very reasonable price.

I haven't really noticed the price recently but, over the years, we've paid between 13€ and 20€ for five litres of Culebrón oil.  The price goes up or down each year dependant on the quality and abundance of the crop. What always amazes me when we pop over to the bodega to get a few bottles of wine is that other people are buying the oil in industrial quantities. I presume that some of it is for restaurants and the like but Spanish cooks do use a lot of oil. All you need to do is to watch any cookery programme or go to get a cheap meal (which will be dripping with the stuff) to see how.

There's a newer oil mill inside the Pinoso boundaries called Casa de la Arsenia out Caballusa way. Their marketing strategy is completely different to Culebron's. They do sell oil in mid sized two litre containers, either organic or not, at around 6€ or 7€ per litre but their marketing goes into the classy looking half litre heavy, opaque green glass bottles with gold lettering and a strange name. One variety uses the arbequina olive which has a very light flavour and the other uses picual which has a much more intense taste. The price on their website is 12.50€ for the half litre bottle. So five litres of that oil would cost 125€.

Last year we went on a wine and oil trail in Yecla. We had breakfast at an oil mill, a mid morning snack at one winery and a sweet course at a second bodega. Interesting and inventive sort of day. The oil mill, Deortegas, had several different oils most of them based on different olives but there were also some flavoured with, for instance, wild mushrooms. The usual thing when tasting oil is to dip bread into it but we talked to a couple of blokes who were tasting their oil directly from glasses. The bread changes the flavour they said. Spaniards take oil seriously.