Our morning started smoothly, getting to our 10am appointment at López de Heredia just on time and after only one round-about u-turn. This was a more expensive tour than the others (nearly double at 30€), so I had high expectations.
The entry building was stylish and modern, with tilted metal doors that I managed to scrape my foot on as we walked in. This tour was in English, so us, a trio from New Zealand, and a couple from the UK got started by entering the truck unloading zone.
With López de Heredia, the emphasis was on tradition tradition tradition. First were the traditional grape-carrying baskets called "comportas" that were four feet tall and make of wood. Then the 100+ year old fermenting tanks made of oak (we've only seen steel for those elsewhere). The tour guide said the wood was insular and made it ferment quicker because of the yeast left in the wood from the previous batches. However, if the temperature, which rises from the fermentation, reaches 35 degrees, then the fermenting stops. Between batches, the massive tanks are cleaned with sulfur and water.
The next step for the wine, though, is clarifying. López de Heredia uses egg whites as well to clarify their wine, and our guide explained the process more thoroughly so I understood it this time. The whites get added to the wine, where they sink to the bottom, collecting sediments as they go. Six eggs are needed per barrel, so about one per every forty liters. It takss 25 days for the wine to settle. They also use vine shoots to filter the wine when it is poured from the fermentation tanks as well, so very natural and old- timey systems, as everything about López was.
The barrels are one of the things that makes López unique. Not only do they use their barrels for 15-20 years because they don't want the oak flavor, they have their own cooperage to make and repair the barrels. All their wood is American oak because it is less porous - necessary for their long aging times. The coopers dry the wood outside for about a year to age it, then they have it shaped into staves. They line up staves along a metal measuring stick to reach the desired barrel circumference.
Once the staves are chosen, one end of the barrel is created with iron rings. A fire is then created to heat the wood to make it pliable enough to round out to a barrel shape using a cable to tighten it, then the iron rings are replaced with steel rings, stronger and tougher for rust.
For the top, reeds are added between boards to increase the air-tightness of the barrel. I didn't get how it was supposed to fit inside the smaller circle, but if you find out, let me know!
After the wine goes through the very long barrel aging process, they mixed the wines together in a process called "cornache" (a French term I couldn't find on the Internet) before bottling them but . López is another winery that almost doubles the required time of fermentation. The crianzas are in oak for 3-4 years (though that includes the fermentation tanks, so adds a couple months that don't count for most other wineries) and bottle for 4. The reservas are in oak for 4-5 years, then bottle for 4 as well, and the gran reservas are 10 years of barrels, 10 of bottles - incredibly old! Each is also rotated twice a year. The great-grand-daughter of the founder is still in charge of the wine- making and tasting.
We went down to visit their cellar, which was hand-dug in 1890 by 70 men so the rocks could be used to make all the buildings. The winery didn't waste anything - old staves stoked the fire for the new barrels, discarded grapes and stems were fertilizer for the vineyards. The cellar, though, is the largest hand-dug in the area, at 130 meters long. At the end of the cellar, it opened up to a view of the Ebro River.
The cellar was dank and dark, like the others, with mold everywhere. The mold attracted spiders, and spiders caught the moths that would otherwise eat the wood of the barrels. They had some bottles that were incredibly old, and just covered in mold, which they saw as a status symbol and proof of the age.
At the end of our tour, we tasted three wines, starting with a white that was aged and fermented just like a red! Their Viña Gravonia was definitely startling because of this. It smelled like a red, but was fruity and finished like a white. They are very vineyard specific, mixing grape varieties, but not vineyards. A bottle of wine was included in the tour (as well as some cured meat, nuts, and other snacks), so I ultimately wasn't unhappy with the price we paid.
However, at this point, it was just slightly before noon. Our last day in Rioja wasn't finished yet! We had a tour scheduled at Ysios, back near Laguardia, at 4pm, but had quite a bit of time between then.
We both wanted to see another winery, but had only emailed some the night before, and no one had responded with spots for that afternoon by the morning. We decided to drive into Haro, since we were just on the edge of town, and poke around for some Internet and maybe something else interesting to see or do.
We parked and started wandering, but the grey day mixed with a city that just wasn't very pretty made it hard to like Haro. We found a hotel with Internet and had gotten no responses from the vineyards in the area. So we decided to attempt a tour of the Dinastía Vivanco, museum of wine culture. It was almost a stone's throw from our hotel last night, but it was big and corporate so we had overlooked it. Well, big and corporate is the only thing you can do spur-of-the-moment!
There was a tour leaving in half an hour through their winery, so we signed up for that and the museum, with an English audioguide to supplement all of the Spanish. Rosie had her espresso, and we both had delicious little zucchini and ham pinxhos (the Basque word for tapas).
The tour was us, following the group and the guide who was speaking in Spanish, with us, our shared earphones that couldn't turn up the volume quite loud enough, hunkered in a corner trying to hear the English recorded version.
Every winery I end up learning a little more about the process, even though it seems Rosie and I could open one up by now, with all of our tours. At this one, I learned the founders had come from Logroño, the soil in the Rioja is clay- like, and ground cover between the vines helps add competition, reduce erosion, and keep a healthy insect balance. Freezing the grapes after they are picked helps lock in the color, tannins, and aroma, and fermenting is most stable at the lower temperatures.
I hadn't realized some of the chemistry before either. The cap created at the top of the fermenting tanks of the skins and seeds rises there because of the carbon dioxide released in the process. When the malolactic fermentation is in barrels, for the small batches, they can't be sealed because of the carbon dioxide until after it has completed. Lactic acid makes the wine "mild and silky" and makes it bio-stable.
They used much more modern techniques than López de Heredia, and were proud of them. Computerized systems controlled their fermentation tanks to keep them the right tempurature, instead of air flow at López. They filtered their air to prevent the mold López was so proud of. Overall, much more sterile, but it resulted in good wine.
We had 30 minutes to wander through the floors of the museum which, given that we are experts on the process now, meant we focused on the history and the corkscrew collection. It was pretty hilarious.
We made it to what we thought was Ysios, and ate an afternoon cucumber. When it was 4:00 and we left the car, however, we realized we had prematurely parked and we were at a restaurant instead! We scooted the last hundred meters down the road to the wavy building we had been taking pictures of, now realizing it was probably where we wanted to be.
The tour had just started with four other people, so we joined and learned about this new venture. Conceived in 1998, the building opened in 2001. The wavy curves are supposed to be reflected in the pools out front to show a row of barrels. The oval shape and the surrounding roads make the whole area look like a wine glass from above. And the tasting room we ended in was the ship's prow.
Ysios is all about exclusivity and high-end clientele. There's a club you can join and buy a barrel of personalized wine for €3000. They make one vintage of reserva per year, and often have a special, non-Rioja label wine for special occasions, such as the one we sampled which was by a perfume maker.
Their process has some quirks. They use algae instead of egg whites to clarify their wine. Their fermenting tanks are conic so the skins have more contact with the wine, and they have a constant spray to re-wet the cap and break apart the skins so they incorporate more into the wine.
Their aging process is similar, though we learned that French oak barrels cost 600€, 200€ more than the American oak barrels. Because of this, they are also experimenting with Hungarian oak as a cheaper alternative to French. It's about 5% of their barrel stock, and they've been using it for about six years. They, like others that want the oak taste, use their barrels when new for three years.
Their two reservas (no gran reservas or crianzas) are aged 14 and 18 months in the barrel. They sort those according to the vineyards, with the older aging for the 80-year-old, low-producing vines, and the less aging for their 12- and 35-year-old vines. All are then in the bottle for two years.
Their cellar was the middle of the building. While most are underground, because they can regulate the tempurature and humidity, they have windows with some natural light to make it a bit brighter.
Their capacity is 250,000 bottles a year. They only have about 5000 bottles using the old grapes, however, which are numbered for collectors.
Lastly, we saw the drawings for the building, as well as an exhibit of the "Seven Deadly Glasses" by Kacper Hamilton. Each represents a sin. We couldn't take pictures inside the winery, but here's a link to them:
http://www.kacperhamilton.com/www.kacperhamilton.com/7_DEADLY_GLASSES.html
We had some snacks with our wine, which Rosie and I stayed to finish off since our lunch was a cucumber. The wine was great, but we had had equivalent wine for half the price. But the herbal smells of the second we tried were quite impressive. As were the views.
After that, it was off to San Sebastián!
The drive went well, only one wrong turn, and we showed up to our AirBnB exactly at 8pm when we said we would be there. Natalia, our host, got in the car with Rosie to go park it as I hauled the bags upstairs in the teeny elevator with the help of her friend. I chatted with Nat's daughter, and pulled out the translator a couple times. We talked about where they were from (Argentina), the weather, the beach, surfing, and a myriad of other topics. Her English was conversable, but at one point she had to stop to conjugate "to go" in her head. It was fun and cute. And her little brother roared around with a Transformer.
We were ready for some food, and all we knew about San Sebastián was where the pinxos bars were. So off we went!
To get from Gros, where we are staying, to the old town area where all the bars are, you must cross a bridge over the river, right near where it meets the sea. There are breakers, and it was our first taste of the ocean.
Our first taste of pintxos (and how many tourists there are) came a couple of blocks later. We followed Rick's suggestions on bars and their specials and started with some spidercrab dip and a shrimp kebab at Bar Goiz-Argi. Next was Bar Borda-Berri, with a mushroom risotto that was killer.
We wandered a bit more to see if anything seemed good. Another of Rick's recommendations was said to be good for anchovies. I think we ended up confusing two of them (so I think we were at Bar Tamboril), but I got anchovy tempura as we asked one of the patrons if he had a suggestion for where to go next.
He seemed a bit confused, trying to describe the street we had just been on, then suggesting a place with mostly cold pintxos. So we consulted Rick for a final time and found ourselves at Bar Astelena. I had a beef tortilla, so an omelette. Rosie ordered a pistachio criquetta, which they fried up and served to us. It tasted good, a little like falafel.
We have to be up early-ish tomorrow, so even though it was a Saturday night, we decided to wander the beach. We caught an ice cream shop just as it was closing (whew!) then began our meander.
It was pretty empty, though under the boardwalk (which was made of stone) were gaggles of pre-gaming friends. One couple was having some wine and a picnic on the beach, and there were a fair amount of people strolling along the pedestrian paths not on the sand. Rosie and I dug our toes in and chatted in the chilly wind.
We navigated our way back to the apartment, and, remembering the conversation we had with Nat, pushed the key in and attempted to pull it out just a little before turning it.
But it wouldn't budge. I tried, Rosie tried, I tried again. We tried all the other keys to see if any of those would fit. We didn't want to buzz because it was after midnight, so we pushed and pulled and puzzled again.
On the seventh minute of looking like we were unsuccessfully trying to rob this apartment building (and we did try a credit card to see if we could slide the bolt), Rosie asked, "Are we sure this is the right building?" We both peered into the door a little harder, looked at each other, moved a door over, inserted the key, turned it, made it into the foyer - and doubled over laughing. We had been trying the wrong building the whole time! But home sweet AirBnB at last.
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