The Minimal Manual

The daily detritus of my life, spilt out onto a keyboard and left to ponder like a Rorschach test.

Sunday, August 21, 2005





Vilafranca de Penedes

Yesterday, Rashmi and I took a Rodiales train an hour southwest of Barcelona to the Miguel Torres vineyards in Vilafranca de Penedes. The small Catalan town (pop. 30,000) sits at the base of the Penedes Mountains and is one of Spain's largest wine producing regions. One cava (champaigne) producer, Freixnet, even claims to sell more liters annually than all of France combined, but I'm suspicious that this claim needs to be fact checked. The town itself is very Catalan, meaning that the people there do not speak Spanish (Castillano) but rather Catala' and identify more with Paris than they do with Madrid. There's even a peaceful but vibrant Catalan independence movement.
Miguel Torres is a global label, producing a wide variety of wines in Spain, Chile, and recently the Russian River valley in California. Our tour started with a short video intoducing us to the various wine varieties and the Torres family, which looks and acts a lot like the British royal family. From there, we moved on to the most innovative part of our tour: Smell-o-vision. Sitting in a small, dark room, we watched abstract visuals depicting the wine-making process as aerosolizers above our heads exposed us to the smell of vine smoke, grape must, and so forth. It was quite an odd, if not innovative experience.
The vinyard part of the tour, though, was very cool. We essentially followed the winemaking process, starting in the fields, moving on to the "macerators" (I think our guide was having some translation difficulties) and fermentation tanks, and finally to the cellars. The cellar we got to see was more than two square kilometers and contained thousands of barrels. In one corner of the cellar we were able to see the Torres family's private reserve collection, which included a hundred or so bottles from 1906. Our guide assured us, however, that these these bottles are more for show than pleasure, as they had surely turned to vinegar by now (p.s., Mom, they said your '79 bottle of Sangre de Torro has probably met the same fate).
I was a little surprised by the size of the grapes. They are barely larger than a marble (as you may be able to tell from the picture). This is a product of the Spanish wine growing method, which plants the vines four times closer to each other than French or American viticulturalist, thereby causing smaller grapes and yields but higher sugar concentrations.

Palau Nacional de Catalunya

Today has by far been our most laid back day (essentially a pool and laundry day), but we did make it to the national palace to go see the Arqueological Museum. The museum displays arqueological findings (including real skeletons) from the area dating back to the 7th century B.C. up to the 5th century A.D. My takeaway message from the museum is that the Romans were administrative geniuses as they had turned Barcelona into a thriving trade center by the turn of the millenium.

1 Comments:

  • At 12:03 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    We will open it up the Sangre de
    Torro when you return and see!

     

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