Wining our Way Across the Penedes Region

Finishing off our 30^th birthday trip with a day-long wine tasting tour in the Penedes region of Spain was definitely the way to go. While normally I’m not a fan of bus tours, this one was well worth it. The wine region is about an hour drive outside of Barcelona, and it seemed like the wineries weren’t just open for drop-ins. They were all specifically designed for group tours. So the bus thing worked out.

Our first stop was Jean Leon winery, a small (relatively speaking) winery with a gorgeous view.

Jean Leon has the ultimate “American Dream” type of story. He was born in a poor town in northern Spain. At age 19(ish), he stowed away on a ship to New York (after 8 failed attempts) and became a cab driver. Now, as a consular officer, I do not condone illegal immigration in any sense, but his wine is pretty great, so I won’t worry about it too much. (Also he’s dead now. Our tour guide said to not be sad that he was dead because “he knew very well how to live life”).

Eventually Jean stopped being a cab driver, moved to Hollywood and started working as a waiter at Villa Capri, owned by Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio. He became friends with James Dean (as you do) and they decided to open their own restaurant. Dean died before it opened, but Jean Leon kept going and ended up the proprietor of one of the more exclusive restaurants of the stars, La Scala.

He decided he wanted to create a special wine just for his restaurant, so he returned to Spain, bought some land, raised some grapes, and made some wine. It ended up being wildly successful; Reagan selected it as the official wine for his inauguration. (Say what you will about Reagan, but he knew good wine.)

ANYWAY, this winery was probably my favorite visit of the day from the standpoint of the place itself (more on the booze part later). After getting a tour of a little museum and hearing the Hollywood history, we went outside to see some samples vines of different types of wine, AND WE GOT TO TRY THE GRAPES. We just happened to be there during harvest time, so they set us loose among the tiny, tourist-friendly vineyard and let us pick grapes right off the vines. BEST. GRAPES. EVER.

Then we checked out the building where they process the grapes into wine (this turned out to be TINY compared to the subsequent places we visited).

We also visited the wine cellar, which was very cool (and also very small – relatively speaking).

We finished off the trip with the tasting of a lovely Cabernet, overlooking the vineyards.

Tasting only one wine was a tad disappointing until we realized it was only 10am and we had 2 more stops during which we would have ample opportunity to get drunk.

Next stop was the polar opposite of the tiny winery created by a rags-to-riches, American Dream Spanish guy. The Miguel Torres winery is massive and has been owned for generations by a filthy rich family. We watched a video about them on the bus and the matriarch of the family looked like she was plucked out of an Upper East Side apartment in 1950. Think Trey’s mother Bunny from Sex and the City, only less attractive and wearing more blue eye shadow. The family also has a vineyard in Chile, and one of the daughters has one in California.

One of the best things about this winery was that when we arrived, in addition to all the foreign tour groups, there were also multiple groups of Spanish children, clearly on field trips. I was definitely deprived on the field trip front.

Small children on a field trip at the winery, waving at our tour train.

This particular winery is so big we had to take a little train around the grounds, where we saw the zillions of vats of wine, which was quite striking, especially compared with the one-roomed winery of Jean Leon. The train tour was quite nice overall, except for a really weird part when we went through the wine cellars and had to sit through a weird, hologram-ish presentation about the wine. The images appeared on screens in front of the barrels of wine. It was very strange, and sadly, impossibly difficult to photograph for posterity.

Massive wine vats

BUT they made up for afterwards. The wine tasting involved a lesson in pairing wine and cheeses. We tried 3 wines and 3 cheeses, first with “good” pairings, where the wine and cheese complemented each other, and then “bad” pairings, where the cheese and wine supposedly clashed. Our teacher was very dramatic, clutching her throat while describing how the “bad” pairings resulted in a horrible, metallic taste in your throat. A little extreme, in my opinion. Call me uncultured, but while I could detect a difference in taste depending on the pairing, I would still happily eat any of the cheeses while drinking any of the wines without too much of a problem!

Post wine and cheese, we proceeded through to the bar, where we could try even more kinds of wine (and brandy, which the Torres company also makes). This is where the fun really began. We each got a type of wine and a type of brandy, then ended up having to basically chug them both (or should I say “rapidly sip”? Is that classier?) due to the imminent departure of our bus, and due to the fact that we wanted to make some purchases in the store. The rapid sipping led to some rapid decision-making, including the purchase of a large bottle of brandy, which I don’t even really drink. Maybe Dad can make a dent in it at Christmas? Anyway, we made it back onto the bus on time and in pretty high spirits. (Get it – spirits?)

The final stop was the Cava vineyards of Freixenet, where we finally got someone to take our picture together:

This was another massive enterprise, with a pretty long tour at the beginning that we both agreed would have been much better if we’d been drinking glasses of Cava along the way. Nevertheless, it was cool to see the cellars that stretched about 4 stories underground, where all the cava was kept. They had bottles from decades ago that were sadly, no longer drinkable. The bottles had flat bottoms on them, which apparently used to be the thing until they figured out that flat bottoms on carbonated alcoholic beverages resulted in exploding booze.

Flat-bottomed cava bottles

Then, we took another little train, ending up at another bar where we had a couple glasses of Cava, plus some much-needed sustenance. We were on a roll with the getting people to take pictures of us thing, so we went for a second:

Finally, after dropping a few euros in the Freixenet store, it was back on the bus, back to Barcelona, and an impromptu 2 hour nap in the hotel before our epic dinner (described in painstaking, photographic detail here.)