Photo by Ralph Lunden
As summer draws to a close, for grape growers, it’s harvest time! For wine lovers, this is also the perfect time to get away and enjoy quaffing the stuff… To celebrate the harvest season, we’re heading to Spain to take a look at the home of 3 Spanish tipples: Rioja, Sherry and Cava. If you’re not thirsty now, you will be by the end of it!
La Rioja for Rioja
Rioja is made using grapes predominantly from three sub-regions within La Rioja in northern Spain. And although there are a few white wines from La Rioja, it’s the tintos (the Spanish word for red wine) that the region is famous for.
Drunk throughout the year, the wine is celebrated around harvest time in September. This year’s Rioja Wine Festival in Logroño is from 20-26 September. Visit www.spain.info for details of this year’s festival. You can also find out more about the festival as well as our wine tasting picks in our earlier blog post: Grape stomping in Rioja
Vineyard at Valls de l’Anoia – just half an hour’s drive from Barcelona!
City of Wine by Frank Gehry at the Marques de Riscal
Photos above by Maria Rosa Ferre and John M
One of our wine tasting picks is the Marques de Riscal, which is worth a visit purely for the incredible City of Wine designed by Frank Gehry. The City of Wine houses their hotel as well as one of the winery’s oldest cellars. Tours including 2 wine tastings are €10.25 and last around 90 minutes. For more info, visit: www.marquesderiscal.com
The winery is just over an hour’s drive from Bilbao, which is the nearest city to fly to and worth a visit in itself. It’s worth having your own set of wheels (as well as having an extra driver so the designated driver role can be shared!) to explore the region from Bilbao. Click here to get a quote on a Bilbao Airport car hire or see our Spain car hire page for more locations.
Whilst you’re there… Don’t miss out on the Basque Country’s pintxos!
Pintxos line the bar in Bilbao
And because Bilbao and the rest of the Basque Country is so close, you must, MUST spend a day or few there too. It’s a foodie’s heaven! Forget tapas, here, you stand at the bar and pick your way through the array of pintxos that line the bars.
See our previous post on Bilbao and pintxo eating here: Bilbao – So much more than a museum
Jerez for sunshine and sherry
A glass of Oloroso sherry and some manchego cheese
The simplest of pleasures are often the hardest to beat. A glass of wine (fortified wine in this case) and good cheese is one of those!
Heading to southern Spain and Andalucia, we go to the home of sherry – Jerez de la Frontera or Jerez for short. Jerez (pronouced heh-reth) is actually where the word sherry comes from… Sherry is just the English word for it.
And if you’re like me thinking that sherry is just that super sweet stuff, you’d be wrong. There is an amazing variety of sherry from the dry and lighter fino to the sweet and thicker cream style that most people associate sherry with. It’s definitely worth visiting one of the many bodegas (wine cellars) doing tours and tastings to learn all about it. Sherry Notes also does a great guide to the different sherry styles here so it’s worth a read.
Sherry is celebrated with its own wine festival every September – this year the Fiestas de la Vendimia starts today (9 September) and finishes this weekend. You can learn more about the festival here.
And for more on Jerez including sherry drinking tips as well as our guides to Jerez Airport and car hire, see our Jerez travel blog.
A must do in Jerez: drink sherry from a tabanco
Aside from the bodegas doing tours in and around Jerez, I’d thoroughly recommend heading to one of the city’s historic tabancos. Each tabanco will serve a range of sherrys and is generally served right out of the barrel. It’s super cheap too with a glass costing around 1 or 2 euros. They’re also great places for snacking with tapas style dishes on offer.
Colourful and rustic streets of old Jerez
The bar at Tabanco La Pandilla
Stepping into here feels like a step back in time… And behind the bar, you can see the barrels of sherry with the style written on the front. I visited a few… Find my tabanco picks in our blog: Soak up old Jerez and drink sherry in its tabancos. You can fly into Jerez direct from London as well as several destinations across Germany. The city is also easily accessible from Seville, Gibraltar and Malaga. Start planning your trip by visiting our Spain car hire page. Don’t forget that you can also choose to pick up and drop off your car hire in different places (although bear in mind there may be a surcharge to do this).
Cava – the sparkly stuff from Catalonia
France has champagne, Italy has prosecco and Spain has cava. All bubbly but each uses a different variety of grapes. Cava tends to be lighter, dryer and a little more citrus-y. It’s also generally easier on the wallet too! This just makes it all the more easier to enjoy 🙂
Glasses of cava by Freixenet
Photo by Jameson Fink
Although cava is produced in other parts of Spain, 95% of it is produced in the Penedès region in Catalonia. This includes the Valls de l’Anoia in the very top picture of this post.
Along with the majority of cava producers, two of the biggest names in cava (Freixenet and Codurniu) are based in Sant Sadurni d’Anoia. To learn about cava and for wine tasting tours, Sant Sadurni d’Anoia makes for a great day trip from Barcelona or one of the region’s other coastal towns.
Inside Codorniu’s cava tasting room
Photo by Maria Rosa Ferre
It makes me think of a cathedral for wine. Like the Marques de Riscal above, this winery was designed by a famous architect – in this case Josep Puig i Cadafalch, a Catalan mordernist architect.
Cava Week
Best time to go? That would be Cava Week! The week is usually celebrated in early October in Barcelona but Sant Sadurni d’Anoia will be putting on festivities in honour of the sparkly stuff from 3 to 5 October for Cavatast. Not that you need another excuse to go but it’ll be a big foodie fest too!
You can find more information on Cavatast by visiting the tourism website for Sant Sadurni d’Anoia: www.turismesantsadurni.com/cavatast
Catalonia is a fab region to explore – there’s the sparkly stuff, innovative food (some of the best restaurants in the world are found here like Celler de Can Roca) as well as having been home to some of Spain’s most forward thinking artists and architects like Salvador Dali and Gaudi. See more of our Barcelona and Costa Brava travel tips in our blog.