Spain — Land of the Bull or the Bunny?
No sooner has the mad March hare loped off but its burrow is taken by the vernal equivalent, the Easter Hare. More popularly celebrated these days as the Easter Bunny, this is not a hispanic custom—its origins being in northern European tradition—but the image of the fast, furry, floppy-eared figure of folklore is more closely […]
A sparkling new year with the Ancestral Method
Tonight at midnight all over Spain the bells that ring in the new year will almost be drowned out by the sound of corks popping, bubbles fizzing and even perhaps the odd choke and splutter. Despite what has been a challenging year for everyone, households will still gather round to celebrate La Nochevieja — the […]
Last catch of the season
As this month draws to a close, so too does the season of La Almadraba. In the waters of Andalusia where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean, and exclusively from April until the equinox of San Juan in the final week of June, skills honed for 3,000 years are used to locate and land one of […]
Paschal pairing is pure poetry
> For my lunch on this Good Friday a fish dish seemed appropriate, and I won’t have been alone today in selecting a platter of Merluza al Horno — Atlantic hake baked in a cream and mustard sauce — as it is one of the fish most commonly used in Spanish cuisine, with 6kg of […]
A border beauty beats boredom
I may not be able to leave the house today owing to the home quarantine which is in force across all of Spain during the current coronavirus crisis, but at least in my wine cellar I can overcome boredom and travel to the extremes somewhat to find a vinicultural partner for my mediterranean-style lunch of […]
¡A vendimiar! The wine harvest has begun
The grape harvest has begun in earnest in the Castilian terroir of La Ruta de Don Federico, a little earlier this year, with around 80 wineries of the Ribera del Duero having already picked some 3 million kilos of grapes across the appellation. For comparison, as of this date last year scarcely a single kilo […]
Next port of call – the Douro
A week before the 2019 programme of La Ruta de Don Federico gets underway, I take a short ‘busman’s holiday’ downriver and over the nearby Portuguese border, where I find two bodegas of historical character and charm. Little more than an hour west of Salamanca, the River Duero, one of the the Iberian peninsula’s greatest […]
Vivid, velvety, Vivanco
Although Castile and León is the heartland of our authentic wine tours, La Ruta de Don Federico occasionally ventures further afield – last year offering guests the opportunity to discover the windmill-dotted Don Quixote country of Castile La Mancha, the white-walled towns and sherry bodegas of Andalusia, and of course the best known wine region […]
Ein Sommer in Salamanca
The German public channel ZDF premiered the latest in its series of made-for-television films with the theme of summertime set in beautiful cities last week – previous settings include Paris, Amsterdam and Prague – and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Salamanca made a glorious backdrop for the romantic comedy Ein Sommer in Salamanca. The […]
La Sierra de Salamanca unveils its new vintage
The Denominación de Origen Protegida (DOP) of wines of the Sierra de Salamanca presented their new outcrop today (27 November 2018) in the Palacio de Figueroa in the old Castilian city of Salamanca, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a grand stage on which to sample the viticultural fruits brought forth from the precipitous valleys […]
Meeting a true pioneer
An audience with a true pioneer of Spanish winemaking – Alejandro Fernandez, the ‘king of Tempranillo’ – at Dehesa La Granja in the Denominación de Origen of Vino de la Tierra de Castilla y León, one of the four bodegas of Grupo Pesquera. Full report to follow…