Live life with fine Spanish wines

Last weekend we went to the Pyrenees and were unfortunate enough to get some poor weather. Friday was a scorching, hot day but the wind picked up in the evening and it rained hard overnight. The next morning it was overcast and pretty cool but at least it wasn’t raining. We went out at about 9:30 in the morning and came back to the house at about 11 o’clock.

It started raining again at lunchtime and we didn’t venture out again until it stopped at about 5 pm. As soon as we stepped out the door, we were hit by the cold air. The temperature had dropped dramatically over the previous hours and it was now positively COLD.

Then we noticed that one of the mountains that can be seen from our house, the Peña Collarada, had a dusting of snow at the peak! On the 12th of July!! This is sunny Spain – how can it snow in July? No doubt there have been other years when it has snowed in July and possibly even August but we couldn’t believe it. We had brought our swimming gear with us expecting to go to the pool and nobody had more than a light jacket. (more…)

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. (more…)