Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Moors, Monks, and Wine

Our room has a wonderful quarter circle shower stall with sliding circular doors. Dave calls it the disintegration chamber and we have to make an electronic noise when we close it. We got up early this morning in a preparation for a big day, and by the time we were both dressed and ready to open the doors onto the balcony, there were already workers in the vineyard. Quima had asked us last night if we wanted a continental or traditional breakfast, and we chose the continental in the hopes that it would be smaller. She was disappointed in our choice but seemed agreeable. However when we came down this morning (as far as we know we’re the only guests) there was a delicious and enormous traditional breakfast waiting for us, which was fine with us. Last night we finished everything, but that seemed to give the wrong impression so this morning we left some of it.

Gerard, Rachel’s husband, picked us up at 9:30 or so and we headed to our first destination, the village of Siurana. Siurana sits at the end of a flat ridge overlooking the whole area. It was the site of a Moorish stronghold which was finally reclaimed by the Spanish in 1153  - the last one in Spain. So that’s the history of it. First you need to know that this not a flat place, and it’s not like home where you have a couple of valleys. The best way I can describe it is to say that it is shaped like the surface of a prune – ridges and valleys going off every which way as far as you can see. There are three primary types of rock – a yellow sandstone, a dark slate, and a very red rock that we don’t remember what it is called. Some of the ridges are rounded, but others have sheer cliffs of the yellow or red rock. It looks very much like the areas of the southwest where the Anasazi built their cliff dwellings, except that there are olives and grapes everywhere. The olives are often terraced and trellised, but many of the vineyards are the old style, just stuck into the side of a steep hill and growing like a bush. The leaves are turning colors and most vineyards have been harvested, but some have not.

The drive up to Siurana is on very narrow, very twisty roads. Gerard is a native of the area and has lived here all his life, and he is very comfortable driving on these roads. So he kind of takes his half out of the middle, which makes them slightly less twisty. The problem is that the drivers coming the other way are equally comfortable with that part of the road, so often there’s a moment of surprise. Fortunately everyone is going slowly enough that there is time to move over. The scenery is breathtakingly beautiful. When you get to the top, in addition to the ruins of the fortress, there is a very small village. Siurana is a major vacation destination for serious rock climbers, so there are hotels (very small), restaurants, a campground, and a parking lot full of Eurovans with German license plates and sleeping Germans. It was raining on and off all day so we didn’t see anybody actually climbing. We also saw the Moorish queen’s leap and the horse hoof print, which I will let you google.

Gerard and Gerard
I’m not a big fan of the back seat on twisty roads, so I sat up front on the way down to Porrera. This is a classic Priorat village – tightly packed houses, steep, narrow streets, gorgeous stonework. The parking lot was also an olive grove, mostly of the tiny arbequina olives. We walked from the car to our first winery of the day, Celler Joan Simó. The winemaker there is also named Gerard (Dave is feeling left out because we’ve not met anyone else named Dave), and he is a young man making excellent wines from garnatxa (we say grenache) and carignan. He makes about 20,000 bottles a year, so a pretty small winery even for here. And also physically very small. They just finished harvest a couple days ago and the winery was in full swing – punchdowns, pumpovers, all the daily activities. It smelled wonderful. He had a friend there, Steve from England, who helps out and also makes his own wine called Cat’s Whiskers. We tasted two of Gerard’s wines and they were both excellent, so we bought one of the bottles to finish off with lunch. As with all the places we’ve visited, his wines are available in the US and they are worth searching out. It was so generous of him to spend a chunk of time with us when he was clearly very busy.

The restaurant where we were going to eat lunch was only a few doors down, but they weren’t open yet. So Gerard showed us around the town. We saw the town hall and the church, but what set this village apart for me was the sundials – apparently they were a mark of wealth, and the town has 12 of them, carefully preserved and restored. The village had once been almost abandoned as the region’s economy tanked when phylloxera came in the 1890s and knocked out the wine industry. There was no other industry and people moved the Barcelona area as industrialization took hold. But now with the resurgence of the wine industry young people are coming back. And also with the wine industry comes tourism and hospitality and so on, so the area is doing very well. The restaurant we went to, La Cooperativa, is an example of that synergy – the winemakers need somewhere to take distributors and buyers to show off their wine with food, so they need superior restaurants. And if there are superior restaurants, people will come there to eat and buy wine. The restaurant is a cellar which has been restored. It has catalan arches, which are flatter than gothic arches but still make it feel something like a cathedral (or a crypt). The food was super yummy – in particular my salad with figs, grated cheese, and a honey vinaigrette and my “young ladies legs”, a Turkish-inspired ground lamb and rice mixture that is breaded and fried for a crispy outside. Dave’s rabbit confit was very good also.

Montsant mountains in the background
Now fed and feeling fine after a bottle of Les Eres, we were off to our next destination, the monastery of Scala Dei (God’s ladder), where Carthusian monks did their monk-ey things from shortly after the destruction of the fortress of Siurana until the mid-1800s, when the government of Spain nationalized all church holdings. The Priorat takes its name from the monastery – Carthusian monks are too humble to have an abbot, so their monastery was run by a prior and would be called a Priory – get it? Priorat had probably been a wine growing region in Roman times, given the climate and the Roman love of wine, but the Moors had pretty much done away with that, so the monks re-introduced wine to the area and the rest, as they say, is history. They were basically the feudal landlords of the area, which is difficult to reconcile with their vows of silence and poverty, but they seemed to manage all right. When the monastery was nationalized, the land was sold to wealthy families and the monastery was allowed to go to ruins – aided by local people coming to take stone for building their own houses. When Gerard was young it was completely grown over and they would play there. But it the 1990s people became interested in excavating and restoring it, and so they have been. It’s a good exercise for the imagination to fill in what’s not there.

The monks also had a winery in town, so that was our almost next stop. In the same square as the winery is a small shop of local products, and we stopped in there to taste some olive oil. Neus, the woman who did the tasting, was an absolute delight – incredibly friendly and enthusiastic. She found out both Dave and I have some Spanish and insisted on talking directly to us in animated Spanish, and we actually got most of what she was saying. We tasted 3 solo oils – arbequina, rojal, and negret – and then the cavaloca oil which is a blend of the three and is perfectly balanced and wonderful. They have another blend which leaves out the negret and adds koroneiki and arbosana, also very good but not as good. Then we tried small dark chocolate balls that she filled with olive oil and salt that you pop in your mouth and crunch up, yum. Then we tried olive oil and honey on bread, also yum. Then we talked about other yummy things and why the youth of today drink too much. When it was time to go we bought a bottle of the cavaloca and there were hugs and kisses all around, and she also gave us a bar of the olive oil soap she makes herself. Huge fun.

Last stop was the Scala Dei winery. We hung out in the gift shop for a while waiting for our tour. They had some interesting things, like T-shirts about the vote on 9 November and magnets of animal butts (I kid you not). Eventually Gerard took us into a kind of reproduction of a family wine cellar. They had some barrels in there that would have been used to make Vi Ranci, the “rancid wine” of the region. Then the guy from the tasting room came and took us on a short tour of the winery. They are right in the middle of harvest, and had the sorting table going. They have a young winemaker who has many different ideas. The highlight of the tour for me was the barrel room, which has pretty much been used as a barrel room since 1692. The lights are on the walls and come on very gradually (I thought it was a cool effect; Dave said it was just how the lights work) so it’s like a mystery being revealed, and the more gothically-shaped roof of the room reveals itself. They are the 5th or 6th biggest winery in the Priorat, but they have a big distinction. In 1974 the woman who was then the head of the family had the idea to separately bottle their wine (rather than sell it as bulk wine) and start selling it as  quality wine for higher prices. This started the big trend which continues in the Priorat today. What was very cool is that they still have and sell bottles of that wine, and we got to taste it. It’s old and oxidized, and not nearly as good as a 1970-era Joseph Phelps Insignia, but it is not spoiled and tastes of history.

That was our last stop, so Gerard brought us back to our hotel. Both on the way to and from Scala Dei we had gone past a road which was closed off because it was being tested for use in a week at the world rally championships – Dave said he could hear the cars on it, but we didn’t see any. Gerard said that there’s always a stage of the championship here, and having spent the past two days on the twisty roads I can see why. We had an hour or so before dinner so I got some writing done. When we went down to dinner Quima asked us if we were very hungry, which we said we weren’t, so she only served us enough grilled veggies and duck confit for 3 people. We had a very interesting dessert of plain yogurt with sweetened almond butter and something that tasted like an almost halva textured version of the almond butter, quite delicious. Rachel came while we were eating dinner and we made plans for the next two days. She has a larger group of other clients so we will be with Anya from this point on. Some parts of the plan require us to be brave about eating in restaurants by ourselves, which makes us both nervous but will help us to become better travelers.


That is all, except I got an e-mail from the Correos people saying I missed a step and that I should immediately upload a list of what exactly was in the suitcase. Who remembers? I made something up and uploaded it. But that has cost us a whole day and makes me even more pessimistic. Ah well.

1 comment:

  1. Ben made fun of me for continually saying "best blog yet," but I LOVE 'em, and look forward to the next ones you betcha! I had a grand time with them - did I say? - with seeing Tim as a definite highlight. What a lovely, positive person.

    ReplyDelete