Spanish Food & Wine Ways

Spanish villageCooking is art in motion
–Ferrán Adrià

Experience

Journey with us to epicurean Spain, a land of many cuisines. Our culinary tours and cooking vacations reveal the essence of Spain.

Our culinary trips in Spain are unrivaled because we are insiders. We specialize in travel in Spain and Spanish food and wine. We have assembled a team of experts–Spanish, American and British–who either live in Spain or travel there frequently. We are insiders showing you the back roads and hard-to find places and people.

You will experience Spanish cuisine springing from Roman-Moorish-Jewish-New World traditions, yet perfectly contemporary. It is cooking based on ingredients so fresh and full of flavor it’s shocking. Not to mention the world-class wines that accompany memorable meals.

Culinary experiences in Spain are sure to awaken your palate and stir your imagination. Join us!

Epicurean Spain

First you notice the focus on food in Spain. The care taken in preparing and serving food. The rituals observed. You realize that food is a big deal in Spain, and also that it is generally excellent.

Next you realize that eveyone seems to be an epicure. Spaniards are accustomed to excellent raw materials and infinite variations on standard dishes, and meals provide sanctioned space for animated culinary critiques. And for communing with friends and family. Bonds are strengthened at tables across Spain.

And so Spanish lifestyles revolve around food and wine. But ordinary Spaniards are as conscious of the products amd the places of origin as they are of the finished platos. Just as Spanish society collectively reveres both the craftsman who coaxes guitars of beauty out of wood and the flamenco artists who play the instruments masterfully, it likewise reveres the artisan producers or growers or gatherers who provide the raw materials and the artist-in-the-kitchen chefs.

The Spanish food-centric attitude towards life is both sensible (healthy) and sensuous. Incorporating a Spanish approach to life and food has always been known to positively affect one’s sense of well being and of course improve the daily meals.

Epicurean Places

Picture a Spanish kitchen deep in rural Spain where wood-smoke buttressed walls are a testament to the centuries of roasting lamb over grapevine cuttings. Twenty-first century kitchens creating avant-garde masterpieces based on local products. Priorat vineyards with centenary garnatxa vines scaling the mountainsides. Glasses of Andalucía’s great straw-amber-ruby colored sherries lined up in the vaulted coolness of a bodega in Jerez.

Travel with us to epicurean Spain, a land long on inspiration, a source of surprise and creativity.

Custom Travel

Spanish streetlight BarcelonaWe can design an epicurean journey for you. Contact us for information about our customized tours for couples, groups of friends, multi-generational family groups, wine clubs or corporate incentive travel. We offer cuisine or wine focused travel, or a combination of the two. Trips available in Andalucía, Madrid, Valencia, Rioja-Navarra, San Sebastián-Bilbao, Priorat, Barcelona, Girona and Extremadura. Call us to talk about your ideal epicurean experience in Spain.

From the Blog:

Slow Food Southern Spanish Style

November 29, 2008

Culinary Travel in Spain

El Puerto de Santa María and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, two legs of the Spanish sherry triangle in Cádiz province, rank among the premier spots in Spain for two things: the tapeo–tapas crawl–and fresh seafood cooked simply. Switching bars every two or three dishes and ordering small portions allows you to sample widely from among shrimp, squid, clams, anchovies, pescaíto frito and a few non-seafood dishes. Fino (sherry) is the drink of choice there to accompany tapas, especially seafood tapas. You can read this article about a tapeo in El Puerto de Santa María.

Spain’s Cheese Country

November 24, 2008

Culinary Travel in Spain

The author of this cheese travel article from the New York Times travels to two of Spain’s northern regions: Asturias and the Basque country. Cabrales, Spain’s blue cow’s cheese, is cured in caves in the mountains of Asturias. The region borders the Bay of Biscay, or Cantabrian Sea, to the north, and Galicia to the west. Idiazábal, a hard sheep’s cheese, is produced in the verdant Basque country bordering France and the Pyrenees Mountains.

Art in Barcelona

November 18, 2008

Art in Barcelona

Travelers to Barcelona can see some of Catalunya’s and the world’s greatest art at what may be the city’s best deal: La Caixa Forum. Entry is free and the exhibitions are devoted to artists such as Dalí, Rodin, Freud, Turner, Fragonard, Hogarth and Cartier-Bresson. The lineup for 2008-09 is as follows:

Alphonse Mucha, creator and proponent of the Art Nouveau style, 19 September 2008 to 4 January 2009.

Collections from the Uffizi Gallery: From Botticelli to Luca Giordano. An extraordinary collection of Italian art from the treasures of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, 21 October 2008 to February 2009

Palladio: 45 masterpieces. An exhibition devoted entirely to the Mannerist architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), 19 May to 6 September 2009

The Caixa Forum Centre is housed in an art-nouveau textile factory, the Casaramona factory, designed by the famous Catalan architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch. See La Caixa Forum

Rioja Style Potatoes

November 11, 2008

I have decided to begin highlighting Spanish recipes in this blog. While I remain an avid cookbook reader and fearless experimenter in the kitchen, many people find it easier to incorporate a recipe into their culinary repertoire based on recommendations one recipe at a time. I will offer some of my favorites, many of which will be classics.

Spanish cooking is deceptively simple, a fact which many people find surprising. The flavor-packed results are due to the strength and high quality of the ingredients. Many dishes take little active preparation time; most of the time is taken up in letting the dish cook.

Here’s a classic potato dish from La Rioja, great for chilly evenings. Seek out good quality Spanish chorizo and pimentón (paprika), both available from specialty stores and the online Spanish goods store La Tienda.

Read more.

Manzanilla Sherry

November 8, 2008

Guest Writer Gerry Dawes

Culinary Travel in Spain

Manzanilla has become such a runaway favorite in Spain that it now outsells fino sherry by more than two to one. In fact, at last report, 70% of the dry sherry sold in Spain was manzanilla. It is the drink of choice at most fiestas in southern Spain and can now be found fresh in the bars and restaurants of Madrid and many other northern cities.

Manzanilla is a fino-type sherry, sometimes called el mas fino de los finos, the finest, the most elegant wine, of the fino family, which includes manzanillas, finos, and amontillados. It comes only from Sanlúcar de Barrameda and has its own denominación de origen, Spain’s equivalent of appellation controlée, called Manzanilla de Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Manzanilla can be sold as sherry from Jerez, but only wine aged in Sanlúcar can be called manzanilla. Like other sherries, it is produced by the classic solera system of fractional blending.

So fickle is nature in the production of manzanilla, that not all bodegas in Sanlúcar are capable of producing it and even in some bodegas that do produce it, there are areas in those bodegas in which manzanilla can not be produced. The big, airy, above-ground bodegas in the barrio alto of Sanlúcar have a number of doors and windows which can be opened to let in air from the ocean side of the bodega or can be closed off if there is too much heat. As with finos, the best producers of manzanilla use only free-run juice. After fermentation the mosto (must) becomes mosto-vino, then alcohol is added to bring it up to 15 - 15.5%. It then goes into 500-liter botas (butts), which are filled only 2/3 full, for ageing in large, airy, high-ceiling bodegas.

The special yeast which makes sherries of the fino family possible grows on top the wine in these partially fillled barrels and is called flor, literally flower, because it resembles the white flowers that grow near the surface of streams. In actuality, it looks like cottage cheese floating on top the wine. Because Sanlúcar is on the humid Atlantic, flor, which needs humidity, grows all year round on the surface of the wine in the manzanilla bodegas, while in Jerez in mid-summer and mid-winter, yeast growth can be severely retarded and the yeast will even submerge, exposing the wine to slight oxidation.

Since the flor does not disappear from manzanilla and the wine has no contact with air, it is the finest, lightest bodied sherry, and is the palest, usually a green-tinged color not unlike that of a fine Meursault. The poniente winds, the westerlies, bring a salt-laden sea breeze and give a light touch of salinity to the wine.

Manzanillas are aged a minimum of five years, which in practice means, that since the five year aged wine is fractionally blended with older wines in the criadera system, they will be five-seven years old, in the case of manzanillas finas, 7-10 years old in the case of manzanillas maduras, and 10 years or more in the case of manzanillas pasadas. While fino sherries in Jerez in a solera may be racked, never fully, just drawn down by quantities equal to a third of the capacity of the wine, maybe five to six times before the reach the bottling stage, manzanillas may be go through 14 rackings in the same period.

Gerry Dawes Copyright 2008