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 bought some porridge oats the other day. The supermarket ones were missing from the shelf so I shelled out double the price for some branded ones, Oatabix. There was a label on the side of the packet. It was a bit like the label you get on electrical goods to show how energy efficient they are. The one on food is called Nutri-Score. I'd never seen it before but it's simple enough. Green is good, orangey yellows are okey dokey and red is a certain ticket to purgatory. Apparently the French invented the label using some UK Food Standards Agency scoring system. It uses seven indicators: energy (lots of calories) -bad, sugar -bad, saturated fats -bad, sodium -bad, fibre - good, protein - good. So far, so good. It's not that hard to see the sense. Obviously it's an oversimplification but that's the idea; to make it simple and fast. I think it's a good idea. Now, imagine you're Spanish and you think that the Mediterranean diet is the bee's knees even though ...

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 ...

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...

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...