Summer drinks

Have you noticed that the Spaniards drink their beer cold? I mean cold. Not chilled; cold. If you go into a bar, run by people of other nationalities, in Spain, the difference can be noticeable. That idea of crisp, cool and refreshing is one of the reasons why telly adverts associate friends laughing together, eating together, swimming at the beach and drinking beer together with summer. Beer isn't a traditional Spanish drink, it didn't really take off  till the 1970s and it wasn't till 1982 that beer took over from wine as the biggest selling alcoholic drink. 

Spaniards notice when Britons, and other Northern Europeans, put ice in their wine. Odd really considering that Spaniards pour their hot coffee and tea over ice all summer through.

When you're out and about, when it's too late at night to drink beer or wine, and we move on to mixed drinks nearly all of them get ice. When the Spanish mix a copa - spirit and mixer type drinks like rum and coke or vodka and lemon - ice is the order of the day. Sometimes there is so much ice in a gin and tonic, gin tonic in Spanish, that it might cause nasal frostbite. It also serves to disguise a less than generous serving of gin.

Vermouth, wine spiced with a mixture of herbs, is as traditional a drink as wine itself. For vermouth to be vermouth one of the spices it has to contain is wormwood; that's what makes vermouth taste like vermouth. It's more or less analogous to sparkling wines from the Champagne region being champagne and sparkling wine from Norfolk being sparkling wine. The most well known Spanish sparkling wine is cava which comes from specific areas, generally in Cataluña. By the way it's pronounced cavva not carver. Vermouth is so Spanish that it gives the name to a period of the day, just before lunch, la hora del vermut. The red versions usually get a twist of orange, the whites get a twist of lemon, olives too and, of course, an ice cube or two – a splash of soda water, sifón, is optional. Drink vermouth for an immersive cultural experience. 

And let's not to forget anis. It's an aniseed flavoured drink more or less like pastis, raki, ouzo etc. There are a couple of local producers near Pinoso, in Monforte del Cid. Anis comes in sweet and dry versions and a dry anis diluted about four to one with water and with an ice cube added, locally called a paloma, was a very common summer drink. That reminds me that I should get a bottle in.

Sangria always confuses me. So far as I know sangria is a Spanish (and Portuguese) alcoholic drink made from wine, slices of fruit, gaseosa (a sort of fizzy sugary water a bit like the cheap lemonade of my youth) with some sugar and a touch of liqueur (often Spanish brandy). The reason Sangria has me confused is that, certainly in the past, Spaniards hardly ever drank it. They left it to the tourists but, nowadays, you'll often see plastic cups of the stuff, ready prepared and labelled as sangria on market type food stalls. What Spaniards tended to drink, and it is quite similar, is tinto de verano, red summer wine, which is just cheap red wine, gaseosa, ice and, usually, a twist of lemon. In the way that the modern world has of marketing some inferior product masquerading behind a name it's difficult to decide which is which among the industrial ready made mixes that belittle both the original products.

Just before I move off booze a special mention for calimocho. This was the drink of poor young people who wanted to get drunk at one of the outdoor street drinking sessions (park up your car, best if it's got huge speakers, play reggaeton and drink calimocho) called botellones. Obviously this is about as true as Britons wearing socks with their sandals or Germans having no sense of humour. Indeed a Spaniard told me the other day it was their preferred drink! Calimocho proper uses the cheapest wine available, think Don Simon cooking wine in cartons, mixed with Coke - Coca Cola that is. Nowadays, on Friday and Saturday evenings, outside supermarkets, what I see are young people pouring vodka into the big bottles of Fanta instead. 

As well as the iced coffee and tea the other, alcohol free, summer drinks are granizado and horchata. Britons often refer to granizado as Slush Puppy but that's a bit like using the word crab to describe the things that were once called crabsticks. There is a vague similarity. Spanish granizado is made by mixing whatever gives the flavour, usually lemon or coffee, with sugar and water and then cooling and stirring the mixture continuously to give flavoured ice with the consistency of wallpaper paste. There is a significant difference to the Slush Puppy type granizado, where the flavour is added, as a syrup, to granulated ice. Granizado tastes of whatever it tastes of to the last morsel whereas, with the syrup versions, you end up sucking on ice pellets. There is a version that you see from time to time, called agua de cebada which is made from an infusion of barley grains (cebada) strained and sweetened. I haven't seen any for ages.

And last, but not least, horchata. Horchata is associated with the Valencian region and particularly with the town of Alboraya. They sell horchata in supermarkets and in bottles in most bars but you should really buy it in a horchateria or horchata shop - sometimes the ice cream shops do horchata too. There the horchata will be home made. The chufas, we Brits call them tiger nuts, are mixed with water, left to soak, crushed and sieved to produce a thick liquid which is then mixed with water and sugar. Again it gets cooled before serving.

I set out to just name a few summer drinks and, as always, the topic has got away from me. I'm trying to stop here but then I remembered that, as well as the hundreds of other drinks available there are two more local offerings that deserve a mention. One is simple grape juice or mosto. The other is Bitter Kas (Kas is a trademark but the drink is always ordered like that) which tastes like Campari without the booze.

Now I'll go.

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.

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.

Freedom, justice, equality and political pluralism

It's Constitution Day today. We're celebrating the 39th anniversary of the document that formalised the new order and the end of the dictatorship. 

In Pinoso Town Hall yesterday there was a reading of some of the articles of the Constitution by members of the community. Obviously it couldn't be today. Today is a holiday and the Town Hall wouldn't be open on a holiday.

I thought I'd go and have a look. I got there nearly at the beginning, the Mayor was doing the opening spiel but I couldn't get into the room where the reading was taking place because the door was blocked by the throng of people waiting to read their bit of the document. I'm not sure if there were people inside the room, an audience, or not. Peering in all I could see was someone standing behind a tripod videoing the whole thing. When I said hello to Colin, there to read his bit and presumably a representative of my clan, someone shushed me so I decided to give it up as a spectator sport.

I did listen to the reading on the local radio. Colin did OK and I recognised lots of other local people from their voices. The Constitution sounded good - all those rights to fair and equal pay, to work, to holidays, to a decent home, to a justice system. Someone got to read Article 155 which is the one that was used in Cataluña, the one that says that the Government, with the approval of the Senate, can take over a region which is not fulfilling its obligations. Interesting choice I thought.

It wasn't the only time I saw the mayor yesterday. In the evening there was a "Musicalised wine tasting" to celebrate the third anniversary of the local wine and marble museum. Marble and wine are two of the pillars of the local economy. The wine tasting was accompanied by music some of which was played on wine bottles and lumps of marble. Ingenious I thought.

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.

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.