Old Hands, part 22

The next suggestion from Mike’s Price Waterhouse colleagues was to take a bodega (winery) tour. They had even gone so far as to book one for us, at La Rioja Alta, one of several major wineries lined up on a road south of the town of Haro. It had been founded in 1890, and it made some very good wines.

Our tour was not very different from winery tours in New York State or California, except for being in Spanish. The guide was knowledgeable and personable, and the group was small—just twelve people. Our Spanish was adequate to the task of understanding him as he showed us the barrel workshop, the smelly fermentation room, the chilly storage areas and the bottling machine. Afterward the tour the guide poured two different wines for us to taste in the bar of the bodega, and we bought several bottles.

The third recommendation was for a restaurant in Haro, so we drove into the town from the bodega. After lunch there we drove to see several sights in the area, including a walled town, a church and a monastery, and then we made it back to the parador in time to watch a special bullfight on TV. Cristina Sánchez fought in the Roman amphitheater in Nîmes, France, which we’d visited the month before. Her success in the fight resulted in her elevation to full-fledged matador status—the first woman ever to achieve that. She received an ear from the bull and was carried out of the ring on the shoulders of the aficionados (fans).

Again on a Price Waterhouse recommendation, we drove back to Ezcaray for dinner at a hotel restaurant. The place was low on ambience—just cold, Band-Aid-colored walls—but the food was good. And on the way out we ran into someone Mike knew—a consulting client. I was amazed that by now Mike had such a wide acquaintance in Spain that he could bump into people he knew when he was away from home.

The last day we visited the monasteries of Suso and Yuso. Suso, on a hillside, was a Romanesque ruin under renovation. Yuso, by contrast, was a perfectly preserved 16th-century building. Nestled in a gorgeous little green valley with hills all around, viewed in the early morning mist, it was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen.

The monastery’s claim to fame was that it was the place where both Castellano (Spanish) and Euskadi (the unique Basque language) were first codified. Monks at the monastery made notes in their Latin prayerbooks to help translate the Latin into the local dialects of the day. This was done not in the existing 16th-century building, but in an earlier Romanesque monastery on the site. We toured the place with an excellent guide whose Spanish was easy for us to understand.

On the way home we decided to take some back roads southward. After spending a couple hours doing this, we realized we weren’t making much progress. “These roads are a little smaller and twistier than they seem from the map,” I told Mike.

“Yeah, I think we’ve been through this town before,” he said. “I know I went around that dog sleeping in the middle of the street a half an hour ago.”

Eventually we found our way through the Sierra de la Demanda, a mountain range with a river running through its canyon, sometimes narrow and rocky, sometimes wide and placid. We stopped for lunch, got to the nearest major highway, and sped home in time for dinner.