Visiting a bodega

Some friends asked us if we could organise a visit to a bodega. They didn't really mean me, they meant my partner, Maggie. She likes wine, she likes to visit bodegas. Wine is one of her hobbies, she knows a good deal about the local wineries and their products. I count beer and brandy among my hobbies but the focus is somewhat different.

Spain produces a lot of wine. I wasn't quite sure how much or where the country was in the pecking order of wine producers but I was sure the Internet would know. Like so many times before I found that the information is not so cut and dried as you might expect. 

Where Spain ranks in world wine production fits with what may, or may not, be a Spanish urban myth about Italian olive oil. Spaniards say that the oil produced in Spain is shipped in bulk to Italy where it is put into stylish bottles with Italian labels and passed off as Italian. The Italians have, for a long time,  marketed their oil as a top quality product, much better than the humble Spanish equivalent, so it's easy to sell Italian oil at a premium. Spain almost certainly does the same with Iranian saffron. And, for years, Spaniards have argued that they ship wine harvested and produced in Spain to France where it is mixed with the local plonk to produce something more palatable. Again, French wine has more caché than the Spanish product. The French though, who are the biggest importers of Spanish wine, deny the claim and counter attack by saying that Spanish wine is often a mix of Spanish wine with stuff produced in Latin America. I didn't spend too much time trying to unravel this tangled skein of international wine trade name calling. It wasn't what I'd set out to write about. Let's just say that Italy is the biggest wine producer in the world and either Spain or France comes second. The US, the fourth largest producer, has the honour of being the country that drinks most wine.

Until quite recently most wine, nearly everywhere, was pretty rough. For the "pensioner" generation of Spaniards wine was simply a drink. Something, instead of water, to go with food. It was often rough enough to need mixing with casera type gaseosa to make it palatable. It's only relatively recently that most Spanish producers have got around to producing wine under controllable conditions, bottling their wine up and putting labels on it to claim ownership of a fine product. Although the first steps to produce a better quality product go back to a system introduced in 1932 the first real attempt to up-quality wine began with regulations in 1970 which were upgraded in 1988, amended in 1996 and upgraded again in 2003. The current system for good quality wine (see the diagram at the head of this blog) starts with DO (Denominación de Origen), steps up to DOCa (Denominación de Origen calificada) and reaches the zenith in VP (Vino de pago). There are only 20 VP wines in all Spain. Four of them are from our region, Valencia - Finca El Terrerazo, Pago Vera de Estenas, Los Balagueses and Chozas Carrascal.

Whatever the politics and economics of it all we're in a geographically good spot for wine production. We have three areas with the DO quality mark in the Valencian Community - Alicante (this is the one that includes local bodegas like the co-op in Pinoso and our bodega in Culebrón), Utiel-Requena and Valencia. In fact some of the wines in the Valencia region have the next grade up, DOCa status, as well as the Vinos de pago mentioned above. Across the border in Murcia there are three DOs - Bullas, Yecla and Jumilla. Both Jumilla and Yecla share a border with our hometown, Pinoso.

So now we're back to where I wanted to be. Talking about bodega visits. The friends wanted an afternoon visit. A couple of local bodegas said they might be able to do afternoon visits but there were "special circumstances" that made it impossible this time. Basically if you want to visit a bodega it's going to be a morning visit. Unsurprisingly visits at the weekend are the most popular.

There was a time when you could just show up at a bodega and there was an even chance that they'd have someone who could show you around. It was never particularly common and it's certainly not like that any more. Bodega visits are now a business. You need to book up beforehand. Some bodegas are more organised, more reliable than others. We foreigners are often a bit loathe to use the phone, because of the language difficulty, and we think that an email or a WhatsApp message will be easier. Some bodegas will respond to emails and messages but the simple truth is that a phone call is still the surest way to do it. Or to go in person to book of course.

The cost varies. I seem to remember that when Maggie first started dragging me around bodegas we got a couple of tours for free. Maggie tells me that's because I have a dodgy memory (or because of my beer/brandy hobby) but she agrees that the price was usually a nominal 3 to 5€. The visits cost a lot more now. It's impossible to generalise because there are all sorts of offers and the bodegas keep coming up with new ideas. The typical, basic trip, which comes out at around 12-15€ per person, includes being talked through the process of wine making as you stare at stainless steel tanks or oak barrels, followed by a wine tasting with three or four wines. Usually there's a bit of cheese and ham too. 

That experience is now added to in all sorts of ways from the frivolous, shoes and socks off to tread the grapes, to the more upmarket, where a meal becomes part of the tour, through to the plush, luxury weekends where wine and food are mixed with all sorts of pampering. I suppose that the only limits are the imagination of the people offering the programme and the boundaries imposed by any health and safety requirements. I've seen publicity for picnics among vineyards, courses in wine harvesting, full dining experiences with fancy chefs in impressive surroundings, opportunities to taste the wine before it's strictly ready directly from barrels and storage tanks, a day where you get to be the winemaker, blending various wines to make your own designer product, art exhibitions and concerts in bodegas etc., etc.

If you've not visited a bodega, even if you're not a wine buff, it can be an interesting experience. I've done too many but I still enjoy the way that the different bodegas, all of which vary the way they produce the finished product, insist that their way is the best. That's the spirit!

To start here are links to two of the easiest networks for local bodegas. There are many more only a Google away.

Local Alicante bodegas

Local Jumilla bodegas

Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used

I don't know if you were made to read Shakespeare at school. I was. Shakespearean characters drink lots of wine. The wine they drank would be like a wine that is, nowadays, produced in just a handful of bodegas here in Alicante province. It's called Fondillón. I like it. It's price shot up when hordes of pesky wine reviewers discovered it and gave it big points scores so it's a while since I tasted it.

In the distant past a standard form of vineyard tenancy agreement lasted as long as the original vines were still in production. Vines produce fewer grapes over time so growers uproot old vines and plant anew. To maintain their lease the growers left some of the original vines in place. These old, tired plants were hardly worth harvesting so, by the time the grapes were cut from the vines, they had withered and were raisin like.

Fondillón is made from monastrell grapes. Fondillón has to have at least 16% volume of alcohol. To the casual drinker Fondillón has similarities to the sweeter sherries or ports but its high alcohol content, unlike theirs, doesn't come from addeing alcohol to the wine base. The alcohol comes from the high sugar content of the raisined grapes. The grapes are mashed up and the yeast on the grape goes to work turning the sugar into alcohol. There's a lot of sugar so the alcohol content gets up to between 16º/18º. That amount of alcohol kills the yeast and the fermentation stops. This process takes about three or four weeks. There is still plenty of sugar left in the mix which is why Fondillón is sweet. This newly fermented wine is added to barrels which hold similar wine from earlier harvests.

To be called a Fondillón the wines have to be aged in huge, old oak barrels for at least ten years; it's the long ageing that makes the wine what it is. The wine is produced using the solera method where wines from different vintages are mixed together to ensure a uniformity of style. If you've ever drunk sherry, decent sherry, not the stuff that Auntie Gladys has at the back of the sideboard from last Christmas, you'll know that it doesn't have a vintage, a year, on the label. That's because it's a blend of the wine from several years. The date on the Fondillón label, if there is one, is the date that the barrel was first laid down. It's an expensive wine to make because it has to be stored for ages, often for decades.

When it's time to sell the wine about a third of the amount in the barrel is drawn off. Obviously enough it's drawn from the bottom of the barrel and one of the Spanish words for bottom is fondo which is why the wine is called Fondillón.

Fondillón nearly died out in Alicante. Around the turn of the 20th Century an insect plague, phylloxera, devastated European wine production. It hit France first and the Spanish wine growers grabbed their opportunity to sell their product to drinkers left thirsty by the French. The low yield Fondillón vines made no economic sense at all. Fondillón production collapsed, Then phylloxera hit the Spanish vineyards and reduced production to a trickle. Nobody produced Fondillón. A chance meeting of two men in the Primitivo Quiles bodega in Monóvar, where there was still an old barrel of Fondillón, led to the wine being produced again in tiny quantities. In time production spread to a few more bodegas in Monóvar, Algueña, Pinoso and Villena. Our bodega in Culebrón makes Fondillón.

So, if you fancy supporting a world class wine with local history you know what to do. But don't expect it to be cheap.

Lovely

Just a bunch of assorted trivia that has tickled my fancy in the last couple of days.

There are a lot of stars in Culebròn. That's probably an incorrect assertion. I suppose there are exactly the same number of stars as there are anywhere but lots of them are easy to see from Culebrón because we get lots of cloudless night skies and there's very little light pollution. That's not quite true either because, at the moment, we have a dazzling Christmas light display which, for the very first time this year, features a spiral of LED rope around the palm tree. The Geminids meteorite shower was flashing across the sky all last night though in an even more dazzling display. Lovely.

We went to the flicks yesterday evening, we often do. We'd been to visit someone and we were a little late away; we went the long way around so we arrived at the cinema a few minutes after the advertised start time. The cinema we often use shows the sort of pictures that don't always attract a lot of advertising. So, sometimes, if the start time is 6.15 the film actually starts at 6.15 but, then again, if it's a bit more Hollywood, the 6.15 film might not start till 6.30 after the trailers and ads. Whilst Maggie waited to buy the tickets I went to have a look at the monitors to see if the film had begun. If it had we had a second choice. The manager, who was on ticket collection, said hello, lots of the staff greet us by name nowadays, and asked me which film we wanted to see. I told him. It was due to start 10 minutes ago he said, but there's nobody in there so I'll start it when you're ready. A private showing and to our timetable. Lovely.

Bad keepers that we are we'd missed the annual update of the vaccinations for the house cats. I took them both in today. I was amazed - apart from the chief vet everyone that I saw in the vet's surgery/office is doing or has done at least a couple of English classes with me. Of course I shouldn't be driving but I thought the 5kms in to town wouldn't hurt. As I drove Bea home she had a bit of an accident, bowel wise. She's not a big fan of car travel. At the exact moment that the stench of her reaction assailed my nostrils the very obvious yellow van of the bloke who looks after my motor went the other way. He flashed his lights in greeting. I would have waved back but a bit of chrome trim chose that exact moment to fly off the front of the car and bounce off the windscreen. I went back to get it later, on the bike, and fastened it back on to the car with duct tape as a temporary repair. Lovely.

And finally, yesterday, we passed the bodega/almazara in Culebrón. There were a stack of cars and vans queuing to hand over their olive crops to be pressed into oil by the almazara, the oil mill. The bodega, the winery, did its stuff back around September time. So I strolled over with the camera to take some snaps. I have no idea what the process was but I liked the small scale nature of it. Little trailers full of olives, plastic bags full of olives, people standing around and chatting waiting to have their crops weighed in. The cars are obviously modern enough but the process is probably as old as the hills. Lovely.

Oiling the wheels

One of my standard responses to anyone who asks for a description of Culebrón is to say that we have a restaurant, a bodega and a post box. I should perhaps change the bodega to say bodega/almazara because Brotons produces both wine and olive oil. A bodega (in this sense) is a winery and an almazara is an oil mill

I went to get some oil the other day and I was a bit shocked when Paco, one of the owners, wanted 20€ for the five litre plastic bottle. It wasn't the price that was a shock, it was the difference in price between this and my last purchase. I'm sure it was 15€ last time. 

On the label the description of the oil says that it is de extracción en frio which means that it is cold pressed. I don't quite know what that means. My, very simple, understanding of olive oil is that the very green stuff, the extra virgin olive oil is the best, produced from the finest olives, whilst virgin oil is made with slightly riper or damaged olives which makes it slightly more acidic. Olive oil labelled simply as olive oil or pure olive oil is, usually, a mix of both pressed and refined oils. I think there is European legislation to say that any oil labelled virgin must pass a taste test and have been extracted from the olive by pressing rather than by chemical refinement. Because the label from our local almazara doesn't say virgin or extra virgin I can only presume that it doesn't reach the required criteria. 

Now there's another oil mill in Pinoso over towards Caballusa, near el Prat called Casa de la Arsenia. They produce virgin olive oil. They sell oil in half litre heavy bottles that look as though they are ceramic rather than glass. The name is a little more complicated- Ma' Şarah - with the apostrophe and that funny s, the typeface on the bottles is fancy, the colour scheme is chosen with care to look "organic" and "quality" and they stress the olive variety - either the more intensely flavoured oil made with picual olives or the lighter oil made from the arbequina variety. I bought some - one variety cost 9.40€ for half a litre and the other one costs 9.90€ which makes it about five times as expensive as the stuff from Brotons. They do five litre plastic bottles too, both organic and ordinary, with a mix of both olives.

So in one place we have traditional Spanish marketing and, in the other, “value added” through labelling, aesthetics and increased quality. Something similar is happening with the wine around here, well in Spain actually. Spain is usually listed behind Italy and France in global wine production though we were told in a bodega last year that Spain is now the largest producer in the world. There are several Spanish websites that say the same thing. Whatever the truth Spain produces a lot of wine and it sells most of it to other people who then put it into bottles, make it into sangria, sparkling wine or wine mixes. Most goes in big tankers to the French, Italians, Germans and Portuguese who turn the dirt cheap wine into something with value added, with nice labels, with cachet. Spaniards drink less and less wine and more beer every year but Googling around for who drinks most wine turns up very contradictory evidence. My best guess/synthesis is that, per head and in order, it's Andorra, Vatican City, Croatia, Portugal and France with an honourable mention for the Falkland Islands (Malvinas for my Spanish readers) at number 8 – the UK comes in at 29th. Quantity wise it seems to be the USA, France, Italy and Germany who top the lists but, whilst consumption in the USA is increasing, the French and Germans, like most Europeans, are drinking less wine each year. Expanding markets include Brazil, Canada and, inevitably, China.

A couple of years ago our bodega, Brotons, suddenly had new shaped bottles, new varieties, wine boxes, new labels and Roberto, the owner, became Robert. They were chasing a more sophisticated market. The same has been going on in Jumilla for a few years now and, in fact, all over Spain. When I visited the bodega in Pinoso the other day, which is the largest producer of organic wine in Alicante, it was obvious that they were on the same trail; new names, new labels and a few more barrels for producing crianzas and reservas down in the cellar rather than putting it into a HurTrans tanker  - HurTrans is a transport firm with its roots in Culebrón.

Increasingly Spanish wine, is Denominación de Origen – where all the grapes must come from the region, where there is a body to oversee the production of the wine to ensure that it is produced in such and such a way with such and such controls and that basically it's as good a product as the region can produce. Our local DOs are Alicante, Jumilla, Yecla and a bit further away Bullas. Again, Googling around, there is a slightly more prestigious classification which is Denominación de Origen Calificada or DOCa. The main difference that I can see between ordinary DO and DOCa is that for DOCa the wine must be sold in bottles. That suggests to me that it may be possible for someone to produce wine that fits the DO criteria but is then bulk shipped to, lets say, Marks and Spencer who bottle it up in the UK but label it as DO Jumilla or Alicante.

So upping the game on olive oil and on the wine. As we passed the el Cabezo salt dome the other day, in the charabanc coming back from the marble quarry and heading for a tour of the Pinoso bodega our personable mayor, Lazaro, was complaining that the salt shipped from Pinoso to Torrevieja as brine should be labelled as being from Pinoso. I've seen coloured, and expensive, salt for sale that says it's from the Himalayas. Marketing, marketing – all is marketing.

Being two short ones

A man called Matthew Hirtes contacted me. His little description on Twitter says Going Local in Gran Canaria author covers Spain+ for the likes of Telegraph Travel & The Huffington Post. I was impressed. Well I've heard of both newspapers and I actually read one of them.

He was asking me to do something with him on Spain Buddy which is one of those English language sites with lots of information, news and interviews about Spain mixed in with the inevitable advertising.

Always happy to get involved in a little self promotion I said of course. But the contact had been via Twitter. By the end Matthew must have been tearing his hair out at my failure to understand what I'm sure he considered to be simple instructions. I read Twitter entries reasonably regularly but I've never understood quite how the topic linking works with @ and # so I'm a bit of a passive user. We got there in the end though so if you got here via that link sorry for the circular motion. Plenty of other entries below to keep you amused.

Oh, by the way talking about using things I don't understand I've got a Tumblr account too now. No idea what you're supposed to do with that. It's probably for young people.

Culebrón

Culebrón is one of the satellite villages of the nearby town of Pinoso. Culebrón is an unusual name for a village. Usually the word Culebrón is related to snakes. Big snakes. Or soap operas. Most Spaniards simply presume I'm mispronouncing the name when I tell them where I live. The last headcount said 112 people live here amongst them three British families with a fourth currently rebuilding an old house.

Culebrón is dusty and a browny, beigy, yellow colour. It is not a place where dogs, cats or humans worry too much about traffic - there isn't a lot. It would be wrong to describe Culebrón as pretty but it's not ugly either. There is a complete mix of houses but most tend to be old and look typical for the area - stone built, maybe with concrete facings, blinds and grilles over the windows, various colours of paint jobs. Plenty of oddly shaped concrete and corrugated iron sheds too. There is quite a lot of greenery and trees, mainly pines but with wild figs and pomegranates. The village is surrounded by vineyards, olive and almond groves and lots of crops I don't recognise.

Children are the usual beneficiaries of Spanish wills so houses generally pass to the sons and daughters. Most Spaniards don't like to live in a village so, until we foreigners arrived, country properties were unwanted. In the end the brothers and sisters would agree to keep their inherited house for family use simply to avoid the faff of selling it on. Of course some families live in Culebrón all year round but it really livens up during the summer when people move out of the towns and to the villages where, local wisdom says, it's cooler.

The village is basically cut into two unequal halves by the CV83 road which joins Pinoso to Monóvar. Most of the village is on the North side of the main road but there are a couple of smaller clusters of houses to the South; we're in one of them. Addresses in Culebrón are just numbers. So number 1 is on our side of the village on the slopes of the Sierra del Xirivell. Just on the other side of the main road is Restaurante Eduardo and he's number 17 so my guess is that there are seventeen houses in our little group.

Eduardo's restaurant is one of two businesses that I know of in Culebrón, the other is the Brotons bodega and oil mill. There have been a couple of attempts to make a go of businesses alongside what was the old main road but, like the Bates Motel, moving the road made them untenable. Nowadays, apart from various farmers, the restaurant and the bodega there is no obvious business in Culebrón. There were businesses in the past - for instance a building near to us used to be a shoe factory not so long ago. There are no shops so vans and lorries bring essentials like bread, cheese and bottled gas to some impenetrable timetable. Of course there may be thriving Internet businesses or cottage industries that I don't know about but I rather suspect that the 8Mgb download speed  and the less than 2kw power supply to most houses may be a little limiting.

Services are few and far between. I think a bus stops outside Eduardo's once a day on the run to the hospital down in Elda but that may be old information. The village school which was opposite the little square has long gone, there's a bit of a run down basketball/football area next to the recycling bins, the post box and post delivery is a bit unreliable, the public phone was taken away a while ago but most of the village (not our part) got mains drainage and fire hydrants a few years back. There is also a little chapel, an ermita, used principally during the village fiesta as well as a social centre which is used for community and private events. We do have a Neighbourhood Association which occasionally organises trips and always runs a couple of meals each year.

Our village fiesta is a weekend in July. There is a repetitive programme on the fiesta weekend but it's then when the village is busiest. My guess is that the talking and socialising is infinitely more important than the gachasmigas competition, the chocolate y toña session or even the Saturday evening meal with live music under the pine trees. Mind you for the past three, or maybe four, years there has also been a morning walking and running race organised to coincide with the fiesta and that brings hordes of people to Culebrón.

There's lots more to Culebrón but this piece is already too long so that will have to do. Good place to live, advantages and disadvantages like everywhere, but not too shabby at all.

Centro de interpretación Casa del Mármol y del Vino

It was, I think, called the Wine Resource Centre - well it wasn't because it's name was in Valenciá - but now it is called Centro de Interpretación Casa del Marmól y del Vino - The Sociocultural Institution for the Interpretation of Marble and Wine. Casa doesn't translate easily in this context. Even then you think they could have worked on something snappier. Perhaps the reason they haven't got around to giving the exhibit a new sign is that they are going to need quite a big board to fit all those words on. The idea had been talked about for quite a long time but the actual implementation seemed to happen with remarkable speed. Perhaps funding had to be spent to a timetable or somesuch. Perhaps that's why there is no sign.

The idea of a celebration of wine and marble is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in Pinoso where the two are big economic activities. Marble is the biggest moneyspinner in the town by far because of the huge open cast quarry. It's owned by Pinoso but generally hidden from view behind Monte Coto mountain. It's the village on the other side of the hill that gets the blighted view, the noise and the dust in return for very little economic benefit. Wine of course has been important in the area for centuries. We try to reflect that importance in our own house.

With funding from Levantina, one of the big stone companies that quarries the marble, and a bit more from Pinoso Town Hall for the wine exhibits we now have the Interpretstion Centre in this building that used to be used for occasional exhibitions, book launches and lots of meetings.

The new venture opened last week but we took until today to get there. The man who looks after the building showed us around the whole thing. It's not that big to be brutally honest and, even if you took the time to read all the information presented in Castillian, Valencian and very acceptable English, you could probably do it in twenty minutes  Our guide made it a much lengthier affair but we also got a lot more information and probably someone else to say hello to as we walk around the town.

My personal favourite was the video that went with the wine exhibition. It showed a family out picking the grapes and loading them into the trailer behind a tractor. Not a lot of rush about the process. Time to stop to eat and to drink wine from a wineskin whilst the background music provided the right sort of mood. It reminded me of the film that goes with Video Games by Lana del Rey if you know it. In the marble exhibits the quotes from locals were what I liked best - such as the advice from a mother to her children - if you hear the sound of the charges being set you go and hide!

Nice little addition to what Pinoso has to offer. I hope it attracts a few more visitors. There was nobody else to look around with us today and I guessed we had been the only visitors all morning. Mind you it will probably help when they get a sign. At the moment, only we locals know it's there.

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Para abrir una cantera hasta la década de los cincuenta era necesario un cabrestante, cable, dos grapas, ocho o diez picos, dos mazas, diez o doce cuñas con sus flejes y, muy importante una escuadra para que el bloque estuviera a escuadra y poco a poco se iba comprando otros.

Secret Wine Spain

Maggie likes wine. It's no secret. She likes a good Rioja and she likes Ribera del Duero too. But Maggie thinks it's very unfair that so few people recognise the quality of some of our local wine particularly the product from the Jumilla wine region.

Jumilla shares a border with Pinoso so it's very local. We also share a border with Yecla which has a separate quality mark for its wine and, of course, we are in Alicante which produces some excellent wine too. We even have a small bodega in Culebrón village. There are lots of bodegas to visit but some tours and some wine are better than others.

Maggie likes to eat out. She can wax lyrical about some of the local food though she can also be disparaging about the chop and chips menus of so many places. You have to know where to go she says. You need local knowledge.

Maggie says that we have some breathtaking scenery around here. I can't disagree. Sometimes just driving up from La Romana or over to Yecla I just break into a big grin as I watch the landscapes pass. Staying here can be a treat but knowing where is more difficult.

So Maggie had an idea. Maybe she could help people to appreciate our local wine, our local food and our local scenery. So Secret Wine Spain was born. It's a work still in progress as Maggie comes to grips with marketing, website building and blogging but if you fancy a tailor made wine tour in Murcia or Alicante then Maggie's your woman.

Still in business

Facilities in Culebrón include a post box, a social centre and a dusty basketball cum football area. Business wise we have the bodega and oil mill and rather surprisingly we still have two restaurants. For me these restaurants have the huge advantage that they are only a few hundred metres from our front door. Drinking alcohol with the meal becomes a possibility.

The Nou Culebrón opened in December 2012 and it's still open. Three separate bar restaurants have failed in the same building whilst we've been in the village so congratulations to Amador, the boss, for keeping it going.

The other restaurant Casa Eduardo was open when we arrived in the village and it still is. Eduardo's is best described as singular. The décor, the furniture and the tableware have not, to my knowledge, changed in the nine or so years we've been eating there. My chair was a bit wobbly. The man at the next table tried to find one that wasn't but gave up. The culinary offer is usually local rice or stews but not always.

I quite like going to Eduardo's. The man shows fortitude. I like the idea of supporting a local business. In his way Eduardo is always pleased to see us. He does tend to mumble a bit though and the imprecision of some of his offers along with my faltering language can cause misunderstandings. Maggie is less taken with the place than I am. She remembers the time when we played the inevitable game and she got a sausage.

It usually goes like this. Eduardo lunges; what would you like to eat? We parry; what have you got? For several years it used to get quite vague at this point. Only when you'd not ordered something did you realise that it was available. Mussels, for instance, used to be a regular on the unwritten menu but we were never offered them.  Working on the principle of ask and you shall receive Maggie asked after the availability of the local sausages. Her daring was rewarded with a single sausage served in splendid isolation on a well worn side plate.The last couple of times though the vagueness has gone.  I have been firmly guided towards the correct decision. The answers are restricted to yes or no. "Would you like a nice lamb chop?" I suspect that the kitchen is not overstocked.

Geoff and I went there today. Our meal included the inevitable fried almonds mixed with plain crisps, a basic salad and toasted bread served with sobrasada. Main course was a selection of perfectly good grilled meats with chips. For puddings we were given a choice of two, some hesitation on my part so Eduardo offered both on the same plate. I suppose there may have been very little of either left as we were given very small portions. Coffee too and the whole lot for the two of us was just 20€. Can't complain.

I'm sure Eduardo will still be there when Maggie gets back home in the summer. Something I am sure she is looking forward to

El Pinós, Poble de Marbre i Vi

Traditionally the first words of a seaside landlady to this week's guests are that they should have been there last week when the weather was oh so much better. It was a bit like that today in Pinoso. Yesterday we had bright sun and reasonable temperatures in the mid teens but today it is foggy and cold. And today is a big day for Pinoso; Villazgo.

Villazgo is the celebration of the independence of Pinoso from nearby Monóvar on 12th February 1826. It's the day for a nostalgia trip in Pinoso. Out come all the traditional costumes, the folk dancers, the regional games - anything vaguely related with the past will do. It's always a good day. We have stalls in the street, we have displays from the neighbourhood associations, the wine producers, local groups of every shade and hue and, probably the best bit, lots of local businesses associated with food and drink set up a stall in the town hall car park. Punters buy a set of tickets which they can swap for wine, cakes and cooked food. A veritable feast.

Today was just a bit different. The local council feels that it needs to try to attract more visitors and one of the ways they thought to do this was to try and be a bit more pushy about the town's identity. So they've invested 46,000€ in some signs, flower beds and information boards. They spent another 24,000€ on doing up one of the central streets. I'd somehow got hold of the mistaken idea that most of this stuff had been found stashed away, unused, in a storeroom so, if you're one of the people I told that to, I apologise.

The slogan for the identity campaign is the title of the blog. Easy if you're one of the 2.4 million Valenciano speaking tourists. Now if they'd chosen Spanish Spanish, i.e. Castillian, they'd have had 407 million native speakers and goodness knows how many other second languagers. I can see the dilemma though. Anyway my Valencian is up to this. Pinoso, town of marble and wine.

P.S.We went back at around 2pm for a spot of lunch and the sun was shining and the town packed to the gunwales.

New wines and new names all around

When we were at the village meal the other day the wine that came around the tables was from the local Culebrón bodega. It was different though; new wine varieties, new labels and a different, more modern, bottle design. Just to show how modern the white wine came in a blue bottle.

I only tried the two reds, the Shiraz and the Merlot, but I enjoyed them both.

The thing that caught my eye most though was that on the label, most of which was in English, the wine maker of the family, Roberto, had been renamed. Wines by Robert Brotons it said.

Foolishly, at the time, I forgot to take a picture of the wine which meant I had to pop back to the bodega the next weekend to buy a bottle for the pack shot. So, in the original picture, from the event, on the left, you can just see one of the new blue coloured wine bottles in amongst the sparkling Galician ciders and Catalan wines. Fear not - the orange stuff is Fanta.

The picture on the right is from the weekend after the meal.

Villazgo

Villazgo is an event in Pinoso to celebrate the town's independence from the nearby town of Monóvar in 1826. It takes place in the town on the Sunday nearest to February 12th and it's one of the nicest festivals that we go to each year anywhere.

Villazgo is a celebration of local culture so the stalls are loaded with local crafts, industries and traditions like wine making, basket weaving and shoe making. In the side streets they organise traditional games, basically the local handball and a version of horshoes called caliche. On the stage the town band plays traditional music and the dance groups like Monte de la Sal don the traditional gear and get up and do dances from the local area. Hundreds and hundreds of people wear black smocks that were the everyday work gear around here for years.

Perhaps the best bit though is the food fair. You hand over a few Euros in return for which you get ten tickets, a tray, a wine glass and a ceramic dish. You then go from stall to stall handing over your tickets in return for local food and drink like wine, migas, gachamigas, rice with rabbit and snails, gazpacho (not the Andalucian one but a meaty broth on a dough base), pelotas, longanizas, morcilla, perusas, torrijes, rollitos de vino or anis and lots more that I don't remember the names of. The only down side to this event is that thousands of other people enjoy it as much as we do and sharp elbows are an essential  element of getting to the food stalls.

The programme for the day has, up to now, only been available in the local language, in Valenciano, and I asked a pal who acts as a go between between we Brits and the local politicians to suggest that it should be available in standard Spanish. The answer he got was that the event was "ours" and I suppose by implication if you don't speak Valenciano then you are not one of us. Nonetheless, Maggie has just pointed out to me that the programme for this year is in Castilian too.

And in the hills

Down on the coast, near Cartagena, I mentioned that there are gangs working the fields to crop cabbages and similar green winter produce. I also tried my hand at picking oranges. We've just arrived back in Culebrón for the weekend and we stopped off to pickup 5 litres of the local wine (5€ well spent) ready for an evening in front of the telly. Our bodega is also an almazara, an oil mill, and people were queing to unload their crop. It's olive harvest time up here in the hills.

They weigh in the olives, get a chit and they can either swop the chit for cash or for the equivalent in fresh pressed oil. Roberto thinks it is quite amusing that we Britons always take the profit in oil whilst the Spaniards take the cash.

Posting wine

Maggie wanted to send some wine from our local village bodega to her family in the UK. The bodega has a website on which they offer to send their wines (and olive oil) to lots of European countries so we thought it would be a piece of cake to pop over there and get a few bottles into the post.

Antonio told us it wasn't worth the cost but it may be worth checking with Roberto. We went back a couple of days later to ask Roberto. Better talk to Paco in the office he said. Paco said he would have to talk to the transport company. Could we come back tomorrow? The transport company hadn't quite got around to sending the rates by email as they'd promised when we went back. Paco phoned again and got the carriage rates.

It all seemed perfectly reasonable and we shipped 36 bottles at an average cost of 4.59€ per bottle.

Talk about fostering international links or is that international drinks?