Wine in La Rioja, Spain

Saturday November 10th
Four girls from my program and I decided to take a day trip an hour south of Bilbao inland to a famous area of Spain called Rioja. This area is comparable to Tuscany and very famous for their wines. We took the 10:30 bus to a town called Haro (in the middle of nothing) and somehow found a tourist office to find out more information about where to go wine tasting. Conveniently enough the woman there spoke English and new we were students, so she sent us to Bodega (wine cellar) Lopez de Heredia that had amazing wine called Viña Tondonia. They produce their wine the same way as the founder did 130 years ago. They don’t make their wine according to modern tastes, just in the traditional way whether it is good or bad. We tasted six wines- two white, three red and a vino rosado. We had a red wine from 1981- older than us by five or six years! The woman who gave us the wine to taste spoke great English as well and told us all about the history of the wines. I guess a hundred or so years ago, the upper class drank white wine and it was much more expensive than the red because of taxes for one thing. So wine producers would put something in the white wine to make it look red so it would not be taxed then fix it later to make it white again. But apparently the wine that is pinkish- the vino Rosado, is the product of that tradition. I have heard horror stories of people bringing back alcohol to the US from Europe. If you are under 21 I guess the US fines you more than a thousand dollars and if you don’t declare your items at the airport on the way home you are even more screwed, so I thought I had better not buy any wine to take home, although I wish I could have.
Then we took a 20 minute bus to Briones, a little further south, where there is this huge museum about Spanish wine. They has a magnificent entrance with Cyprus trees lining th road and red grape vines on each side with the distant outline of mountains in the distance- we could see for miles and miles! There were exhibits on corks, (who knew there were so many interesting corks from all over the world! They had some corks attached to walking sticks and weird objects) wine bottles / jars, ancient art dealing with wine, and all different videos of the old and modern processes of making wine barrels, making corks, blowing glass, and cutting down trees. A huge glass sliding door let up into this heavenly room with hundreds of barreled wine. The scent was unforgettable- so rich and sweet, but not stale or humid. I could live in a room like that! Then we got to taste their red wine and grape juice. The grape juice was so natural and pure, not like anything I have ever tasted! Upon our exit, and after buying postcards and silly trinkets, the sun was setting over the mountains- so beautiful! Then after an hour nap we were back in the city of Bilbao- always good to be home!