Wine Tasting and Sitges

A few weeks ago (ya, I know I am doing this entry a little late), I went on a daytrip with my program to Penedes, Sitges, and Sant Piere. About 20 of us hopped on a greyhound at 8 am and headed to our first destination, Codorniu, a cava and wine vineyard in Penedes. This was about a 30 minutes bus ride from Barcelona. We started with a tour of the plantation and factory, and then we learned about how cava is made and went underground to check out the whole process. Cava is the spanish name for champagne. If it is not made in France, you cant call is champagne. There are two requirements for something to counted as cava...first it must go through a second fermentation process in the bottle (this is where yeast is added with the sugar content, making the bubbles) and second it must age for at least nine months once completed. At this vineyard in particular they require 12 months of aging. The longer it ages, the better it is but cava cannot age past 5 years or the substances with dissolve and it will begin to taste like vinegar. At the end of the tour, we got to taste a Brut cava, which means that no sugar has been added. It was delicious, so after the tour we bought some little souvenir bottle at the gift shop!

After this fun wine tasting adventure, we got back on the bus and headed to Sitges, a little beach town about 30 minutes south of Barcelona. I have been to Sitges once before, for the Carnival festival in February, but this time the weather was a lot nicer and we actually got to enjoy being on the beach. We had free time here for a few hours, so we strolled around the town and did a little shopping, and then headed down to the beach for lunch and some time to relax. Sitges is a beautiful town and is a very fun place to go if you want to have some down time and just hang out.

After Sitges, we drove to Sant Piere, a little town mostly known for their wine vineyards. Here with met with a man who owns a small vineyard. He explained to us, in Spanish, the process of making wine. Unfortunately I did not understand it all, but basically this guy gets different plants shipped to him, and each one grows a different grape, like one for cabernet, one for pinot noir, etc. Then the plants grow into vines which grow grapes each year, and he takes the grapes off and puts them in these hugs bins to make the different kinds of wine. It is kind of confusing and my explanation doesn't do it justice at all. After the explanation, we went inside and got to taste 2 white wines, 2 red, and 2 champagnes. We talked about the different aspects of each one, like it they were flowery, nutty, woody, grainy, sweet, bitter, acidic, salty, etc. Then we got to taste them and buy some of the ones we liked after. It was a really fun and interesting day because we got to learn a lot about wine and cava making, which is really important in Catalunya.

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