Visit to a Riojan winery

Or, rather, una visita a una bodega riojana. I went with a wine tasting group called a 'Curso de Catas'. Our group learns about tasting and elaborating wine. Although I just started with the group a week ago, we all went to Fuenmayor, a pueblo less than 10 km out of Logroño, to visit a ancient yet little known winery called Marques de Arviza.

Fuenmayor is a village with a large number of wineries, many of which have centuries old caverns underneath the buildings and the streets. Although Arviza is one of the oldest wineries in the region, dating back to 1874, the stone arches located in the ancient caverns 12 meters below the surface date were first created by the Romans in the 16th and 17th centuries. Since that time they've been reenforced, but nearly all of the old stones remain.

Here's our group tasting the wine after a tour of the winery. Their 'reserva' was fantastic. The reserva is a red wine that has been aged for a longer time in the barrel and then again for a longer period of time in the bottle. The harvest for their reservas was in 2001.

Bodega at Sorzano

The teachers at my primary school invited me to go to a lunch with them. The lunch took place in one of the teacher's villages. The village was located just outside of Logrono, and it was called Sorzano. The teacher and several of his friends had purchased an old building and turned it into their own private club / restaurant. Abby and I got a ride out to the village and met about 15 other teachers from my primary school for lunch.

The village was located in the country surrounding Logrono. It was very quaint. Nice rolling countryside... lots of farmland, little gardens in people's backyards... it was a very pretty place.

This was a kind of potluck, where everyone brought the food. They basically cooked and made everything there (salads and meats). The meats you see above are all Spanish pork. Top left is chorizo (spicy sausage), bottom left is salchichon (salami like sausage), and right side is morcilla (blood sausage with rice). A potluck in Spain is called a bodega.

The men cooked the meat outside using the old branches of grape vines! The flavor was absolutely wonderful!

The ladies (and me) got to start eating early. They had made the salad already, and we snacked on that, olives, cheese, wine, and the meat when it was finished.



This was our dessert! It's a popular Spanish cake called a mil hojas (Mill - Ohas) a thousand leaf pastry in English. Lots of layers of flaky pastry and sugar and cream. I've just read that it's a South American pastry... but it's quite common in Spain too. And I can tell you from experience that it's one of the better desserts they have. Here's the group of us sitting outside. Abby and I are on the far right side.