Live life with fine Spanish wines

If you don’t live in Spain, you may be surprised to hear that the so-called Spanish Omelettes served in all major hotels as a breakfast item is not a dish eaten in Spanish homes or restaurants at all. The real Spanish Omelette (called Tortilla Española or Tortilla de Patatas in Spanish) is made mainly from potatoes and eggs. It looks like a quiche or a pie.

I didn’t bother to learn how to make a Potato Omelette for the longest time. It is available in almost every single bar in Spain. Its popularity and availability is equivalent to a hamburger in the US. Most Spanish will tell you a Potato Omelette is very easy to make but I never believed them. I have seen it made a few times, and it looked like quite a bit of work to me. Now that I live in Malta, I get an occasional craving for a Potato Omelette, so after experimenting with making it for a few times, I finally made a decent looking but great tasting one the other day. It was not very difficult, but cooking the potatoes took quite a bit of time. Read the rest of this entry »

As far back as I can remember people in bars in this part of Spain have been ordering “un claro de Navarra”. I always assumed this was what we would call a rosé in English. But then I discovered that a claro is not the same as a rosado. And to add to the confusion you also often hear a request for a “clarete”.

Rosé wine has never been hugely popular in Spain but then it hasn’t lost popularity either. It has always been drunk mostly as an aperitivo and usually by older people. Now that rosé wine seems to be losing its image as an unsophisticated and somewhat inferior wine, I thought I would investigate the differences between rosado, claro and clarete. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a terrible confession to make: I have never had a North American wine!

I have tried wines from all over the world, both old world and new world, from Spain, France, New Zealand, Chile, Bulgaria, you name it…. I’ve even had Chinese wine. But I’ve never, ever tried a bottle from the U.S.

I think I’ve been living in Spain for too long. It’s so hard here to find anything other than Spanish wines that we rarely drink anything else. You can, of course, go to wine shops which will have a handful of foreign wines, mostly French, a couple of Argentinean / Chilean wines and maybe a New Zealand or Australian bottle or two and that’s about it. If the wine shop owner is really adventurous there just might even be a solitary South African bottle somewhere in the shop. In addition to the lack of selection, there’s the problem of price: these wines won’t be cheap. Read the rest of this entry »

MAPA, the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fishing and Food has announced Ribera del Arlanza and Tierra Del Vino de Zamora as Spanish wine appellations. The two regions are now official wine D.O. (denomination of origin).

Being in the Wine biz I, of course, immediately after having read this ran to my map of Spanish appellations to try to figure out where these two regions are situated. The D.O. Ribera Del Arlanza is situated some 40km south of Burgos city. The main grape variety (95%) is …tempranillo (tinta del pais), not so surprising. Then the second most planted grape is Garnacha (2%). There is a little bit of Mencia, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Albillo for their rosé wines. For the white wines they use Viura, but very little white wine is produced. Read the rest of this entry »

An expat couple in Madrid recently contacted us about the possibility of putting their Wedding List on our site. Obviously, we are absolutely delighted to participate in such a special occasion and are really enjoying working on how to set up the Wedding List and what to include in it. Read the rest of this entry »

We regularly have clients asking us what the difference is between a Denominación de Origen / Denomination of Origin (D.O.) and a Denominación de Origin Calificada / Qualified Denomination of Origin (D.O.Ca.). The short answer is that the D.O.Ca. is a higher category for the truly great wine-making areas. There are currently two D.O.s within this category: Rioja and Priorat. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are planning to come to Bilbao soon (or later) and you want to experience some great wine and food typical of this area and also want a chic and cool international atmosphere you MUST visit restaurante Kikare. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, I opened the last bottle of Jose Pariente Verdejo 2006 that came with our shipment during the move. I love this wine. It is refreshing, with a hint of sweetness, perfect for a quiet night of Internet surfing. I typed in www.notesfromspain.com in my browser to check out what Ben Curtis has to say on his blog. The post that caught my instant attention was published on 17 April, Online Business in Spain - Getting Rich from Google Ads. Read the rest of this entry »

I must have drunk at least a hundred bottles of Spanish red wines before I tasted my first Spanish white.

Now, that sounds like I drink quite a lot but it probably took me something like 7 or 8 years from that I started drinking wine till I encountered my first glass of Spanish white. In 7-8 years you have time to drink a lot of wine, especially if you are in your late teens and early twenties and grow up in Sweden. Back then my perception of white wine was a bottle of overwhelmingly sweet Liebfraumilch or oxidized goat pee (at least that’s what it tasted like) from Cyprus. So I tended to stay away from the white stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a secret. I no longer live in Spain. I moved to Malta with my family last year and I have been telecommuting from Malta since then. I used to think I was one of those who would stay long-term in Bilbao (using Ane Miren’s terminology, see her blog on 8 April) because I married a Basque guy. Things do not go as planned sometimes. When the opportunity knocked, we took it.

Malta is a small country with a population of slightly more than 400,000 people. When we first arrived in Malta in the summer of 2007, I was appalled to see young teenagers drinking alcohol in the streets of Paceville. The Paceville (pronounced as Putt-Che-Vil) area has the highest concentration of restaurants, Read the rest of this entry »