Moscatel tasting

I like to be active, not climbing hills or doing press-ups active, but doing something out and about. I'm not keen on work as a substitute. I don't need to paint walls or clean the kitchen, prune trees, shop, cook, clean toilets or keep drains clear to keep myself occupied. We're all a bit work obsessed in my opinion. I did a lot of it at one time, the paid sort, and now I look back on it and wonder why I wasted all that time. The pay, obviously, but that doesn't explain its centrality in British society.

So here I like to get out and about. We go to fiestas, we go to events, we visit castles, we go to the theatre and concerts and the cinema. We see exhibitions, we go to talks and tramp around forests for stargazing and to hunt out scorpions. Some things are never repetitive, even though you've done them before, because each event is different enough to make it potentially memorable. On the other hand there are some things which are so much of a muchness and start to blur into one. Bronze age sites, cathedrals and the like can be very similar unless they evoke some sort of emotional response. Excellent and varied as the Moors and Christians events are, or Fallas or the San Juan hogueras, each time it tends to sameness and repetition. It's got to the point, after twenty years of living here that far too many things provoke a bit of been there, done that sort of feeling. It can be comfortable at times but at others I sometimes wonder why I've dragged us out to watch this or that parade.

I was looking for something fresh, and I came across a wine tasting and town centre visit in Benissa. Now wine tasting is hardly something we've never done before. During several wine tastings in several bodegas, especially when I'm the driver, I've been close to slumping into stage IV sleep. I'm asked to suggest what this or that wine smells of (does it make a wine better that it smells of berries or chocolate?) and to tip the glass so I can suggest where the colour would fit on a standard pantone chart. I've never understood why any colour is better than any other. Maggie is very interested in wine and we have visited a lot of bodegas from La Rioja down to Andalucia. The only difference was that this wine tasting, in Benissa, was of Moscatel. I thought it might be interesting. Unfortunately that was because my knowledge was so flawed as to be useless and I started from the wrong premise.

I thought that Moscatel was sweet wine, a dessert wine. The one that restaurants tend to be hand out as a freebie at the end of a traditional meal in our home province of Alicante. Likewise I thought that the, almost treacly, Mistela, which is sometimes offered instead, was some variety of Moscatel. I was intrigued as as to how anyone could organise a wine tasting around such sweet wines. It's fine, alongside the pudding and perusas at the end of a meal, especially in a very small quantity, but this cata or tasting, promised six different wines. I imagined the participants, overloaded with sugar, behaving very much as Violet Elizabeth Bott always threatened to behave - vomiting that is. It's a fair way up to Benissa but I thought it may be different enough to be memorable.

It turns out that, like Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc or Riesling or Pinot Grigio  - Moscatel is simply the name of a white wine grape. It's white so, unlike our local red grape Monastrell, it can't be used to produce both white and red wines. Moscatel is only good for white. Depending on when the grapes are picked and how they are processed the Moscatel grapes can produce anything from a dry white through to the sweet wine I knew. So there was a much wider range of Moscatels than I knew about. 

The sweet Moscatel is made by only harvesting the grapes right at the end of the season when they have withered to look almost like raisins or sultanas and built up a really high sugar content. The other drink I associated with Moscatel, Mistela, turns out not to be a wine at all but a liqueur. It's made by adding wine alcohol, distilled spirit, to freshly pressed grape Moscatel called grape must or mosto in Spanish. So Mistela is just spiked grape juice. Adding the alcohol stops any fermentation and preserves the sugar in the must which is why it is so sweet.

So it didn't turn out to be that different. We were still invited to comment on what the various wines smelled of and even on their colour. First answer, alcohol, all wines smell of alcohol. I guessed at white as the answer to the second question but the group leader seemed to ignore my comment.

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Just in case you're too young to know what the Violet Elizabeth Bott reference is about she was a character in Richmal Crompton's "Just William" books. Her threat, if William and his friends did not include her in their schemes, was to “scream and scream until I’m sick!”.

A couple of outings in Spain

Interesting week this week. Out and about in Spain much more than usual.

Last Saturday, the Neighbourhood Association of our village, Culebrón, organised a coach trip to a couple of towns over the Murcia/Alicante border. We went to Cehegín and Bullas. As always with the neighbours, the vecinos, it's the human bit that makes it interesting. I'm not a particularly outgoing or effusive person, but that doesn't mean that, as we waited for the coach to arrive and as people drifted into the agreed setting-off point, there wasn't an awful lot of cheek-kissing, hearty handshakes, backslapping, and a general bonhomie that always makes me grin internally. We got to Cehegín and did our bits of wandering around, looking at museums and churches and whatnot, but the real focus of any outing with Spaniards is the meal. The restaurant that the organisers, María Luisa and Inma I think, had chosen in Bullas was absolutely cracking.

There was a busload of us, 50 plus people, and the meal was 30€, so not particularly expensive. I expected dead ordinary. Mass catering is mass catering, and banging out food always diminishes the quality but, to be honest, if I'd turned up as an individual diner and got the same food and the same service, I'd have been well pleased. There is no way that I would have got as much drink as we got as a group though. Ramón, alongside, kept asking me if I was thirsty, and, whatever the answer, he'd order up more beer or more wine. By the time the meal was coming to a close, the noise level had increased markedly, the jokes were more frequent and raucous, and that slight alcoholic haze settled gently over the coffee. Our visit to the wine museum may have lacked a little in formality, and the coach home was noisy.

On Wednesday two groups organised by the local town hall, the book club, I'm a member of, el Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas, and the Adult Education service had arranged a coach trip to Valencia for a presentation and question and answer session with a Spanish writer called Laura Ferrero. The greetings at the pickup point were much more "Good morning, how are you?" than back slapping and kisses. Once in Valencia we got a tour of the Library building, where the event was being held. It's an enormous, decommissioned or is that a deconsecrated monastery. Impressive building; not so impressive a tour. One of those tours loaded with dates and details and almost nothing interesting or entertaining even though the place itself had served as monastery, prison, library and conservation centre which must have produced any number of interesting tales. 

The session with the writer was good. Her presentation was brief but interesting and she answered the questions from the audience in a straightforward and succinct fashion. The talk done, it was meal time. This time the food was more what I'd expect of mass catering; it wasn't bad, it wasn't good. It was fine and it only cost 21€. The meal though was a completely different affair to the neighbourhood thing. I suppose the difference was that this was a more sober, educational visit with a specific purpose other than leisure but I suspect that the real difference was that there were far more Northern Europeans. The Adult Education people were generally people learning Spanish and we brought our Northern attitudes with us. It was still good fun though, as was the boat ride on the Albufera, a fresh water lagoon crammed with birdlife, which was how we topped off the day. The coach home was so quiet that I nodded off.

My final, out in Spain, event was a visit to the Camera Club over in Petrer. I'd popped in to their exhibition when we were in Petrer for an event a couple of weekends ago, and the bloke looking after the exhibition had told us that the club meets regularly on Thursday evenings. I mentioned these meetings on the Facebook page of the Pinoso Camera Club, and one of the, I think, founding members of that group said he'd be happy to go along if I did. So Bill and I went along to a meeting of the Grup Fotogràfic de Petrer yesterday evening. 

The activity was that the members of the group had been given "homework" to take a nighttime photo. A photography professor from Madrid then commented on each of the photos in a sort of Zoom-type conference call. People could join the presentation either in the HQ of the club, as we and about maybe fifteen people did, or from their home or office. I'd talked to the organisers beforehand, and they were perfectly welcoming and friendly without being effusive. I was a bit surprised that, as the club members came in to the room, they didn't seem surprised that there were a couple of gúiris in their midst nor did they show much interest in us. I found the session perfectly interesting without being overwhelmingly exciting. I'm considering signing up as the quality of the photos didn't make me feel totally inadequate. I think, for Bill, it was all a bit more difficult as he doesn't have a lot of Spanish. When the critique session was over, I checked a few questions about club membership and activities with the chap who had been most welcoming, and then we cleared off. Maybe it would have got livelier if we'd stayed for the beer and snack we were offered as we were leaving.