A bunch of grapes

Around here grapes are grown for eating and for making wine.  Pinoso is a bit too high and a bit too cold, to grow eating grapes, but just down the road in la Romana, Novelda and Aspe they're all over the place. The eating grapes are easy to spot. The most popular variety is called Aledo and it is often grown under plastic, protected from the sun, birds, and other pests by paper bags. The bags slow the grapes’ development and produce a grape that's soft and ripe for picking at the end of the year. How very fortunate that one of Spain's most widespread traditions is that of eating twelve lucky grapes, keeping pace with the midnight chimes of the clock in Madrid's Puerta del Sol, as the old year becomes the new. Nearly all the grapes are from around here and in Murcia.

The grapes in the Pinoso area are for wine. Wine is made from mashed up grapes. Grapes grow in vineyards. They are harvested and taken to a nearby bodega, winery, where they are turned into different types of wine. Red wine, rosé wine and white wine can all be made with red grapes. Green grapes can only, naturally, be used to produce white wine. When people ask for a wine in a bar or buy a bottle in a shop they might ask by grape type or region. There is a sometimes a link between the region and the grape - for example tempranillo grapes are the most common for Rioja wines and Sherry is made with palomino grapes. On the other hand Chardonnay grapes are grown worldwide so a Chardonnay could be a wine from the grape's native Burgundy or from places as diverse as Chile, New Zealand and Sussex. Wine bottles always say what grape type was used to make the wine.

The most common grape variety around Pinoso is monastrell. Lots of other types of grape are grown here but monastrell is the local variety. Monastrell doesn't need a lot of water, it doesn't need decent soil and it can deal with enormous daily temperature variations. The monastrell vines are usually cut back to the bare stump at the end of each season. In the past, to attain a quality mark, the vines had to be planted in a certain pattern. Looking at the vineyards you can see horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines of plants. New regulations allow growers to use different planting patterns and still get the quality mark. It will take years for things to change so you can still show off your local knowledge by pointing out the vineyards, with the traditional pattern. You can, sagely, add that these grapes will be picked by hand so they will be used in better quality wines. Machine picking bruises the fruit. The vines planted so the tendrils can grow up a wire support are for machine picking. The wine made from these machine picked grapes is still largely exported in tanker lorries, usually to France, where it is mixed with the local wine to produce a much more palatable end product.

All over Spain certain types of food and drink are given a quality mark. The scheme is usually called Denominación de Origen Protegida or DOP. The idea is that the quality is kept up by specifying what the ingredients should be, where those ingredients should come from and how those ingredients should be processed. By keeping up the quality of the traditional product it's possible to maintain a premium price. The local denominación is Alicante but just over the border into Murcia we have Jumilla and Yecla too. So, the next time you have visitors make sure you buy at least one bottle with denominación written on the label and you'll have a ready made topic for that awkward conversational lull that happens, every now and then, even with friends.

Breakfasting

This last weekend we popped over to Murcia to see las Cuadrillas in Barranda. The event is principally a folk music event with bands on every street corner but there's also a big street market.

We were looking for breakfast and there was a stall in the market selling migas. Now migas come in all sorts of shapes and sizes but the ones in Barranda seem to be fried flour and water crumbs with lots of sausages and vegetables mixed in. Because it's broad bean season the beans were offered as garnish; migas con habas. Migas are nice but the stall also advertised Spanish, run of the mill, sandwiches or bocadillos which use the bread we Brits call French sticks. The migas were still being prepared so we were able to queue jump by asking for a couple of the sandwiches. The man serving on asked what we wanted to drink. Tea, the drink of Gods, wasn't an option, in fact options were few and far between. The question was really, "Do you want a red wine?" So we breakfasted on red wine. Early morning wine drinking seemed a little strange to us but we know an elderly couple in Culebrón who would never consider any other breakfast drink. Just stop to think about the area and its history and it's quite easy to see how wine could become the all purpose cheap and plentiful drink. 

We learned something new about coffee, perhaps a more universal breakfast drink, while we were in Barranda. I thought I knew what café de puchero was. I thought it was just poor person's coffee made in a big pan to make the most of the grounds. Another stallholder put me right. It is a poor person's coffee but the Murcian variety is, so we were told, made with chicory and then flavoured with lots of sugar and aniseed. In my youth I knew people who had grown so accustomed to the wartime rationing workaround of chicory essence for coffee that they still preferred it to real coffee.

In an earlier blog I mentioned that I went to see a foundation which curates varieties of citrus fruit. They keep alive, literally, the sort of oranges, lemons, grapefruit and limes that don't sit well with the unblemished, uniform and visually attractive produce required on supermarket shelves. On the day of my visit I arrived a little before kick off time so I popped into a local bar to get a coffee (not a wine). I was surprised to see lots of people tucking into a late breakfast of a bocadillo with salad, monkey nuts and olives. There is a bit of a cultural gap between what we Britons think of as breakfast and the Spanish almuerzo which is the first substantial meal of the day. Breakfast for many Spaniards is a very light affair and almuerzo is more a sort of mid morning fuel stop to make up for that. The almuerzo I saw on that day is called bocadillo con gastos or esmorzaret in the local Valencian language.

Gastos, as an everyday word, means something like an outlay or an expense. The use of the word in the context of food comes from the idea that this sort of almuerzo was paid to the daily farm labourers as a part of their wage package, a fringe benefit. Workers took the sandwich from home but the landowner of wherever you were working threw in the drink, wine, and something that probably came from the land the labourers were working. Apparently the esmorzaret is currently having a bit of a resurgence with lots of trendy eateries which are doing modern versions with big, mixed sandwiches. 

When I was checking up on this I came across a piece which said that these sort of gastos should not be convinced with the traditional picaeta. Now anyone who lives in Pinoso will know that there's a bar here that bears that name, it's closed at the moment but the bar is emblazoned with the name. Picaeta is another Valenciano word and it's, apparently, what the rest of Spain calls aperitivos. The little things that you eat as a preprandial - traditionally a few peanuts or olives, pickled veg, lupins (those yellowy oblate spheroids that look like beans) and suchlike.

As I was checking bits and pieces of this entry I was surprised by the number of articles about breakfast traditions. The way they rub the tomato on the oiled and toasted bread in Cataluña, the grated tomato and toppings on toast in this area, the sobrasada and paté in Andalucia or the propensity for butter and jam in Madrid. I resisted though. Maybe I'll do the same the next time I'm offered wine for breakfast.

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.

As traditional as...

We were in Jumilla today for a while. Jumilla is a town just over the border into Murcia. They have "always" produced wine in Jumilla but it just keeps getting better and better. Today we were there for a very small part of their Fiestas de la Vendimia -the wine harvest festival.

So wine is a traditional crop in Jumilla just as pelotas and gazpacho are traditional food. We Pinoseros also claim wine and gazpacho as our own but as we are only 35km away I suppose that's fair enough. After all it's Yorkshire Pudding not Barnsley, Ripon or Cleckheaton Pudding though thinking about it we do have Bakewell Tart and Caerphilly Cheese. Anyway.

So when do things become traditional? Family names, surnames, generally pass from generation to generation. Surnames like Thompson, son of Tom, are equivalent to the Arabic ibn or bin names whilst the Spanish tend to use -ez endings, as in Dominguez. But why did it stop? My Dad was John so why am I not a Johnson? And if it's Fletcher and Barber and Smith why not Mr. Web Designer?

Although they are quite different outfits Spanish bullfighters, the ones who fight on foot, wear costumes based on 18th Century dress as do their horse mounted counterparts. Why did it stick at the 18th Century - why not the 16th or why aren't they dressed, like cyclists or swimmers, in the latest technologies?

So. Just 35kms between Jumilla and Pinoso but in Pinoso the traditional dress for women, in the Fiestas at least, is an incredibly ornate affair The local women folk dancers wear a much simpler skirt that seems to be of circle of cloth made to work as a skirt by multiple pleats. In the Villazgo festival in Pinoso traditional dress for women is more practical, less ornate and the men wear a black smock and neckerchief. Over in Jumilla the costume is much simpler again. It actually looks like something that people may have worn everyday at some time in the past. Cloth and woven grass shoes, simple skirts or trousers, white shirts for both sexes with shawls for the women and waistcoats and cummerbund like sashes for the men

This traditional clothing is only trotted out for traditional events. Women heading for the supermarket wear everyday skirts and jeans and shirts and tops. If anythinng were traditional summer dress for women at the moment it would be shorts and vests. For men shorts and T-shirts. Flip flops or sandals and not the traditional rope soled alpargatas.

I'm pleased to say that this divide between what's trotted out as traditional and what people actually do is not true of the wine or food. Just as Lancashire Hotpot is alive and well so are local traditional foods. In fact maybe it's time for a nice longaniza sandwich with a drop of monastrell to wash it down?

Good morning sir. May I see your documentation please?

I get pulled over fairly frequently by the police, usuallly the Guardia Civil. Normally it takes seconds - they see I'm wearing my seat belt, see that the car has been checked for roadworthiness or whatever and I'm soon on my way. Not always, they sometimes have big guns and give clear instructions about leaving the car s-l-o-w-l-y. I've been breathalysed either three or four times as well. Always 100% clear.

On the way to stay in a hotel in Cartagena last week I was being followed by a police car with speed cameras mounted on the roof. I signalled left and pulled into a parking bay. The policeman started gesticulating and shouting. Once out of the car in that flurry of tripping over things fluster he told me off for crossing an unbroken white liine in the centre of the road. I shouldn't have turned left.

Today we went to visit a bodega though here in Portugal they seem to be called quintas. When it got to the wine tasting I only took about half a mouthful of wine. I've got to drive I said.

Five minutes down the road and we were pulled over by police officers on a country lane - their uniforms had the letters GNR on them. "Documentation please," they said in Portuguese. I tried answering in English, no good, I tried Spanish - that worked. It turned out the poliiceman had been a lorry driver and knew our bit of Spain as well as Spanish. There were no problems with the paperwork. "You haven't been drinking have you?" he asked, almost as a throwaway line. I told the truth. I was lectured on the strength of Portuguese wine and sent on my way. Two police incidents in five days is a bit on the top side thouugh.

Interesting about the language too. I complain a lot about not being able to speak Spanish very well. Being here in Portugal where I have difficulty pronouncing the name of the town that I'm staying in has brought home to me how communicative I actually am in Spanish. It is horrible being so lost and having to be so British about speaking to foreigners - well modulated sounds, a slow delivery and simple words. Of course, just as everywhere else the foreigners put us to shame and usually manage English remarkably well.

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.

Catholic tastes

Yesterday it was rock bands (do they still call them that?) and today it was a brass quartet in the wine cellars of one local wineries; Bodegas Carchelo over in Jumilla.

Bit of a tour of the bodega, then a never-ending glass of wine whilst we listened to the quartet - who were seated amongst the wine barrels - doing their stuff. To be honest the verb listen probably isn't the right one as the audience was noticeably quieter during the breaks between tunes than they were whilst the quartet were playing. Concert over it was upstairs for a buffet of local delicacies with two more wines to try and then a gentle drive home.

PS I hardly touched enough wine to taste it. Ni una gotita al volante.

Two fingers of red eye

My old school pal, Bob Filby, commented on the entry I did about our visit to a local bodega. His comment was that there is a much held belief in England that there is no such thing as a decent Spanish wine.

Actually it's quite difficult for us to make a direct comparison because wines from anywhere but Spain are almost totally absent from Spanish supermarket shelves. On top of that I know very little about wine but I've had a quick Google around this morning and it looks to me as though the expert opinion is that the wines from the North of Spain include plenty of varieties that can hold their head up against anything produced anywhere in the World. The wines from the centre (which includes Alicante) are much more ordinary but they are sturdy, inexpensive and intended "to swill down food." What I should have remembered and what I should have fought the Spanish corner for are the brilliant sherries and manzanillas from Jerez and Sanlucar.

Here's an offer Bob, get yourself a bottle of La Gitana manzanilla (they used to keep it in Waitrose), pop it in the fridge till it's nice and cold and if you don't think that's quality stuff then I'll buy it for you.

For lots of Spaniards though, particularly older Spaniards, wine is a staple. Old chaps in bars drink it instead of having a small beer or a coffee, families buy it in recycled five litre water containers to drink along with their evening meal. It's like bread, olive oil, garlic, onions and tomatoes - one of the standards in the larder rather than the sophisticated tipple that it is in the UK. That's why, often, when we go into a slightly trendier bar Maggie finds that she can't get the red wine she wants and has to settle instead for vodka.

Enoturismo

We've always been big supporters of the Spanish wine industry. Maggie maybe a little more so than me. I worry more about the brandy business.

As well as swigging as much of the stuff as we can lay our hands on we've also visited a number of bodegas but we've never before tried to follow one of the wine routes.

The idea of a wine route is to use the wine "peg" to hang any number of touriist activities on. The key element is obviously the wine producers or bodegas but restaurants, bookshops, hotels,specialist bars and shops etc. can all get in on the act with a bit of thought. I've seen some imaginative links over the years - music in amongst the barrels, libraries running lecture series, cultural centres doing wine appreciation sessions etc.

Jumilla has a wine route. Pinoso has been talking about setting one up for years but so far zilch. The tourist office in Jumilla was deadly efficient and within seconds of pushing the leaflet into our hands we were booked in for a tour and tasting session at Casa de la Ermita, a brand of wine we've seen a lot of down in Cartagena. Tour of the vineyards, tour of the bodega, tasting session, shop - pretty standard I suppose but the route and spiel was clearly thought out and nicely executed.

It worked too; we spent some cash.The friendly young woman who showed us around, Micaela, says that the Casa de la Ermita brand is sold in Waitrose and M&S in the UK.

Back in Jumilla we went to one of the restaurants on the list too and they were playing their part offering wines from all the participating bodegas as well as highlighting the route in their menus.

We're thinking of doing a few more very soon!