VinoBus

Abby and I took a tour this Sunday of several bodegas in La Rioja. We heard about a VinoBus (Wine Bus) at the office of tourism and bought our tickets online, along with our friend Kadda (Katarina) from Germany. We had a café con leche (coffee with steamed milk) at a little restaurant and boarded our bus at 10:30 in the morning. We immediately became acquainted with a Spaniard named Juan who knew Kadda through mutual friends. It’s really funny how people become connected with each other on this side of the world.

So it was the four of us on the VinoBus on the way to our first destination, and the name is a dewsy: Abadía Cisterciense de Santa María de San Salvador de Cañas… in the city of Cañas. Basically the place we visited was a fantastic old church with some vineyards. It used to be a convent… or something? It was a great place. Very pretty. I didn’t listen very well during the tour. I was, though, taking a bunch of pictures, which I will share on the internet very soon.

Abby and I have the internet at our apartment right now. We found a deal at a place called Orange for a USB-router that we’ve successfully connected to both Abby’s Mac and my PC. The problem with the router plan is that it has a monthly-limit for loading information on the internet. We don’t exactly know what this means (if it’s talking about traffic of information, downloads, uploads, everything, nothing?), but we have 3 Gigabytes to use per month, and then we start paying extra. Sooo, we are thinking of changing internet plans again to the first option we looked at (which, subsequently, is looking much better): a telephone landline that would allow us to use a wireless router for WiFi internet (a system that would allow us both to log onto our own computers at the same time without any limitations on loading information). We shall see.

Back to the bodegas. Next we got back in the VinoBus and went to another small country town called Badarán. We visited a bodega owned by a guy named David Moreno, who returned from Barcelona to his hometown to start up his own vineyard. He is doing quite well now. His establish is amazing. They explained the process of the wine to us (I’ve heard it on every wine tour I’ve been on—though it’s still very interesting), showed us the huge tanks where the wine ferments, walked us through the cellars where the wine sits in oak barrels made in America and somewhere else (America though!), and fed us chorizo sausage, bread, and various types of their wines. We tried a Crianza from 2004, I think the year was. They gave us quite a bit, and then just left the bottles out there for us all. It’s a good thing I have control. It was really good, and Juan decided to buy some for his family. He and I sampled some of the wine he ended up getting: Tinto Reserva 2001 (Tinto means red wine; Reserva signifies how long the wine has been aged: in this case, over five years).

I didn’t buy any wine today. I was very content with drinking for free. Abby and I actually bought some box wine the other day from the little fruit shop on our street. It cost us one Euro (about $1.41 or something—gooo exchange rate!) and didn’t taste too bad. Obviously it was nothing like what we drank at the bodegas today; but, there’s always that special feeling you get when you know you get a good deal that kind of overwhelms all the other doubts. Anyways, the guy at the second bodega we visited urged us to look the bottles for the official seal of La Rioja so that we know it isn’t imitation La Rioja wine… (not only did our box-wine have no official La Rioja seal, it was also sealed in a cheap carton and labeled ‘Wine from Spain’… so, while that may be, it is doubtful that it actually came from La Rioja, our topnotch wine producing region of Spain).

The second bodega was back on the outskirts of Logroño. It was called Bodegas Ontañón. They were big on the mythological elements of the wine there. They showed us art about the Greek and Roman gods of wine: Dionysus and Baco. I thought it was interesting that as well as being the gods of drinking and debauchery, they were also the youngest of all the gods (who would have thought?). We listened to their schpeal, saw their art, and then went down to try to wines. They gave us a couple different kinds: the first was a Reserva and the second was a sweet tasting white wine. Very nice. Juan bought some more of their wine too. He said he had a large family.

I was slightly disappointed that the tour didn’t consist of a visit to the actual grape plants. We saw them out of the windows of the VinoBus, and Abby and I could actually see the fat blue-purple grapes below the leaves on the vines. I wanted to check out what the product looked like before it became the wine we know in the bottles. Right now is harvest season. They will be stopping the VinoBus tours very early in November, and we’re not sure that we will go on another; not this year at least. It was a fantastic experience though that led us to meet another really cool Spanish friend. Thank God for wine!

Other notes: You want to try Spanish wine? Go to a liquor store / wine store that you know has a good selection, and then check out their international supply. Stores usually have the Spanish wines grouped together. You should be able to check on the bottle to see if the wine is from La Rioja or not. The marks of the wines I tried today are called 'David Moreno' and 'Ontañón'. They were both excellent. Give anything from La Rioja a try I would say though. It was my favorite wine even before I was selected by my program to go to La Rioja; and the price is usually reasonable too: anywhere from $6 to $20 (and obviously more).

Gotta go. Hasta luego!