I picked up a bottle and continued shopping. At the checkout, I asked the cashier if she knew anything about this wine, and she responded that it was a great wine for the price, a good “weekday” wine, and it was the wine that her father drank with his lunch everyday.

The wine was quite good, definitely one of the highest quality/price ratios I’ve ever consumed. I won’t bore you with those bizarre adjectives wine connoisseurs use, as I’m not one. But I am a bit of a psychology connoisseur, so I would like to discuss things this winemaker did very, very right in packaging their wine.

First of all, the name is genius. It literally means “red [horse] mane”, hence the horse logo, but out of the corner of your eye, or with the movement of someone pouring you a glass, any Spaniard or wine drinker knowledgeable about Spanish wines is going to see the words Crianza and Rioja, both of which are marks of quality and their usage is highly regulated. You have to get official certification to put either word on your wine bottle. Crin Roja is neither crianza nor Rioja; it’s from a vineyard called Vinícola in Castilla La Mancha.

Secondly, you almost never see gold netting on bottles of wine in my price range. Only the very finest wines, usually reserva or gran reserva are netted. The internet tells me that this tradition originates from an intent, by rich Europeans of yore, to prevent the house staff from opening the expensive bottles in the cellar for themselves before refilling and recorking them with an inferior wine.

Why is all this important? Not only do these clever tricks make the wine sell better, but they actually make it taste better!

The industry of expensives wines is mostly all bullshit. Blind taste test after blind taste test have shown that those of us that are not wine experts (and the experts, too, to some extent) base our estimations of wine quality on subliminal and priming stimuli, with price being the primary factor. As neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer explains in his book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist,

What these wine experiments illuminate is the omnipresence of subjectivity…Our human brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that prejudices feel like facts, opinions are indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think the wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a Grand Cru, then we will taste a Grand Cru.

Our sensations from drinking wine are interpreted by a subjective brain that is also factoring in biases and beliefs and expectations. Just like the placebo effect still works even when the patient knows they are getting a placebo, cheap wine in a fancy gold netted bottle with words that look like crianza and rioja will taste better, even if you know it’s all just clever packaging.

¡Salud!

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On Sunday we woke up at 11:00 to the peaceful sound of no baby crying. After a quick breakfast at the pub neighboring the hotel, we checked out and the group of eleven of us took our three vehicles and headed towards Haro. I have wanted to visit Haro for some time, ever since learning about the Batalla de Vino they host every year, which I detailed in the 17th post on this blog back in June 2006. At some point on the way to Haro, the Tom Tom GPS unit in the leading car, decided that it wanted to visit the town of Cenicero. I have noticed Cenicero on the map a few times and chuckled at its horrible name, which is Spanish for “ashtray”. Wielding my trusty GPS-enabled iPhone, I volunteered to lead us to Haro, and in twenty minutes we were there.

We walked towards the city center, saw the town square and the church. Once a restaurant had been found and a table for 11 reserved, we began our bar hopping for tapas.

I love medieval streets like this one.

I went into a wine shop to look around, and one of my friends came in and told me quietly, “This isn’t a wine shop. Follow me down the street and I’ll show you a real wine shop!” He took me to the simple-looking Vinoteca Juan González.

“The 1st club of wine of Rioja”, the sign reads.

Inside, I was blown away by all the variety (all from Rioja, of course) of wine they had.

The stairs down to the cellar were blocked off. Who knows how much wine there is down there!

I thought this wine from 1970 and 1964 was old, until I saw the bottles from even earlier!

The harvest from 1934.

Back outside, we started eying the tapas in each bar.

Shrimp crisps, these are called.

Sometimes I really love my adopted country. From near to far:

1. Bread, Spanish ham, asparagus stalk, quail egg.
2. Bread, Spanish ham, asparagus stalk, cheese, olive.
3. Bread, Spanish ham, asparagus stalk, goat cheese.
4. Bread, fried foie gras.

I had #3, because I’m loco for goat cheese.

Eventually it was time to head to the restaurant.

We ate at the Beethoven II, which was across the street from Beethoven I.

Veronica’s cleverly shaped paella.

My leg of lamb with potatoes. It was wonderful!

Some of my friends had the nerve to order a Pesquera 2006, from Ribera Del Duero, Spain’s other principal wine-making region, Rioja’s arch rival. The restaurant only had one bottle of it. Apparently not many people have the gall to order a rival wine in Haro. My friend claims that Rioja has reigned supreme too long and is resting on its laurels, and Ribera Del Duero is the underdog who’s really putting in the effort and making some great wine. Sounds plausible, and the Pesquera was amazing. But then a good story makes wine taste better.

On our way back to the car, it started to rain, and I took this photograph of a brass scallop on the sidewalk, the symbol of Saint James, and the way pilgrims are guided along the Way of St. James, which passes through Haro.

We drove to my in-laws’, picked up Nora – if she was pleased to see us, she didn’t show it – and headed home to Colindres, arriving just after 22:00, tired, but happy.

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At least some of them were alive and swimming around…perhaps drunkenly.


Looking down into the wine bottle.

Here’s a crop of just the intruders.

So we poured it through a colander and drank it anyway.

I wonder if a professional wine taster could distinguish a regular glass from one that had been “drosophiliated“.

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The Power of Suggestion

The most significant factor in how much you will enjoy a glass of wine is how good you are told it is before you drink it. During our wine tour in Saint Émilion, we were given several wines to try. On some, tour guide told us, “This wine is not yet ready. It will be ready to drink in five years. But if you wanted to really drink it now, you would have to decant it for an hour before drinking.” We took a sip. “See how it’s too aggressive up front? And then the taste disappears so quickly?” the guide continued. And sure enough, we all totally agreed. Then, he gave us a similar wine from ten years ago that “was ready for drinking now.” He added, “See how the bouquet is evenly balanced and the aggressiveness comes at the end, lingers, and then fades very slowly.” What do you know? That’s exactly what I experienced! The ten year old glass of Saint Émilion wine I had during the tasting was some of the best wine I’ve ever drunk. But it’s not worth 50€ for a bottle.

I recall an early episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit where they debunked the entire bottled water industry. They set up a fancy California restaurant with a special Menu d’Eau with various exotic waters from all over the world. One was named, exotically, Agua de Culo, which is Spanish for “Butt Water”. Meanwhile, out back, they were filling up the bottles of water with the garden hose. The waiter presented each bottle to the customers, describing each one using words like crisp, fresh, alpine, glacial, pure, etc. And the customers, after drinking the water from the garden hose, completely agreed with the waiter about the description of the water. It was some of the best water they’d ever drunk. The human senses of taste and smell are extremely vulnerable to suggestion.

Blind Taste Tests

Just like the only scientific way to run a clinical trial is with a double-blind trial, the only way to scientifically evaluate taste is with a blind taste test. Someone recently suggested to me that most people couldn’t even tell the difference, when blindfolded, between red and white wine, but I find that hard to believe. However, the results of blind taste tests are often surprising.

One of the wine tasting guides we had in Bordeaux told us that there was recently a scandal when they had a blind taste test amongst the owners of the Chateaus that make the most expensive wines in the Bordeaux region. The results weren’t surprising to me. Apparently a cheap 20€ table wine came in second place amongst ten multi-thousand-euro bottles that were competing. It was the owners that were doing the tasting, too! They couldn’t tell their 2000€ bottle from a 20€ bottle of regular wine! It just goes to show the arrogance that comes from feeding clients so much bullshit that you actually start to believe it yourself. I’m sure that there are many Chateau owners that understand that the wine business is all about marketing and subliminal suggestion, and they would never compete in a scientific test like that.

Conclusion

My point is that drinking wine is a hugely subjective experience, and that for 99.99999% of us, a 10€ bottle of wine is no different from a 500€ bottle. So unless you are looking for a way to get rid of excess money (see Donate link at top of this blog!), there’s never a reason to pay more for the wine than for the meal it accompanies.

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A grape in the hand is worth two on the vine. But still not as valuable as a grape in…

…your mouth! I love this photo. I dedicate it to Marga’s orthodontist.

This is the kind of countryside we walked through to get to the Clos La Madeleine. Worth viewing large.

I loved walking by the rows of vines, having them line up so you could see down them every couple steps.

No, this isn’t at all confusing having the Château Magdelaine right next to the Clos La Madeleine! We may have wandered around the empty Château Magdelaine before finding our way next door to where our tour group was already finishing.

We arrived at roughly 15:30, an hour late. The tour of the little museum had finished, and the group was doing the wine tasting. The tour guide was an obese man in his sixties who was not at all pleased with our tardiness. “Two thirty means two thirty!” he told us. But we had prepaid with the agency, so he brought out two more wine glasses. We’d only missed the first of four wines to be tasted. I was quite surprised at the demographic make-up of our tour group. Everyone was within three years of thirty years old. There were two Australians, one Brit, two French, one Austrian, and us. Some were open about their ignorance, and others were not. The Brit, when asked by someone what he did for a living, responded, “I’m a scientist,” which caused Marga and me, who were eavesdropping, to burst out laughing, as no real scientist would give that answer.

The wine tasting involved one of the best wines I’ve ever tasted. It also sowed a seed for a wine industry rant that will need a post of its own.

With even more wine in our bellies, we wandered back to town…

The Clos La Madeleine people had the brilliant idea to plant roses at the end of their vines.

The term Clos implies that the vineyard is walled off.

I couldn’t come up with a reasonable sequence of events that would explain this tree growing out of this wall.

Resting on the outskirts of town.

While we were resting, I noticed that we had yet another wine tasting tour thing that we were hopelessly late for. It would have been impossible to arrive there even if we’d been on time at the previous place and gone sprinting to the following one. Plus, all the wine was making us considerably more laid back about the schedules.

When we got to the Les Cordeliers monastery, the woman there was rather surprised that we’d arrived at 17:30 for the 16:00 tour and tasting. We assumed we’d missed that and were just there to see if they’d give us the included box of twelve macaroons. A colleague of hers suggested that we could still have the wine as well, so she let us choose from a menu of five sparkling wines (called crémant). As we didn’t know anything about them, she gave us the two axes of red-white and sweet-dry to choose from. Marga went with a sweet red, and I with a dry white. The woman pointed back to the little garden patio out back and suggested we have our wine out there. The garden was marvelous! The setting sun, the cool bubbling wine, the tables just the right distance apart (about 5 meters) so that you could hear other people but not what they were saying…it was wonderful.

Chilling in France.

We didn’t open the macaroons, since we were still stuffed from lunch.

These bubbles were way prettier in motion.

The ruins of the old monastery.

I loved the design of these bottle deposits for when customers were done with their bottles.

On the way to the car and out of town we stopped again to take a photo of this church ruin, doing our best to replicate the image on the postcard that I sent to my grandfather.

Saint Émilion was a very delightful place. A big merci beaucoup to Michael for recommending it to us. We enjoyed it very much.

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Do you think this pub is British?

Luckily we didn’t have Nora, so we could enter this “No Parenting!” zone. After seeing this sign in several places, I came to the conclusion that it really means “end of pedestrian zone”.

Anthropomorphic candy…never a good thing.

“Please win me this big white gorilla!” “No.”

I loved this ball fountain. I’d never seen anything similar. This kid was pretty good at catching them in the air.

I was never any good at these carnival games.

Gah! A manifestation of my Sponge Bob nightmare.

Montesquieu wasn’t amused by the carnival activities in the square in front of him.

When you view this large, how many copyrighted images can you spot?

Worst. Claw game. Ever.

On the way to the wine museum, Marga asked me to move this potted plant. No problem.

Wine barrels in the cellar-turned-wine-museum.

I wonder if you could just park yourself in the dungeons of the wine museum and pull out a cork screw…

Wine museum Engrish.

Cool staircase we couldn’t go up in the wine museum.

This is my kind of bottle!

Pensive Marga on the bridge in the park.

French geese.

Marga’s keen eye spotted this wonderful display of neighborly boundaries that would make Robert Frost proud. The owner of the house on the left paid to clean its facade, and the cleaners followed the property line right up the chimney. Might need to view large if you don’t see it.

While in the park, we saw this parade of cyclists, each with a musician in the front basket playing a different instrument. Seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in the park on a Saturday!

The Bordeaux Cathedral.

Prayer candles provided an interesting photographic subject.

Focus on the back.

Focus on the front.

This shop window made my mouth water. Strawberry and raspberry pies! Mmm!!!

Our general conclusion about Bordeaux is that it is a very beautiful city with quite a lot of character, much more character than either of our two neighboring cities of Santander and Bilbao. After living in England for several years, and then in Spain for several years, when I visit France, I find it shockingly British, when compared to Spain, in the style of shops and houses and the way people act, etc. I mean that both in a positive and negative way. Several times during our visit, I said, “Bordeaux would really be very nice…if it wasn’t for all the French people.” While that sounds offensive, it’s really entirely a reflection on my frustrations with the language and understanding of the culture. Both Marga and I left France with a desire to learn French…not that we have any time to do so…

In the next post, we travel to Saint Émilion, the quaintest medieval wine village ever!

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This is a scan of the front and back of the brochure that lived through three days of partying.

The ten bars and the SMS codes to send to vote.

First we went to a restaurant called El Guti, which is run by one of our friends from salsa dancing. It’s good to know the boss at one of the best restaurants in town.

GUTI1: El Guti‘s Hamburguesa de Merluza (Monkfish Hamburger) was very good. Strong fish flavors and a sauce that required bread mopping.

GUTI2: El Guti‘s stuffed pepper jumped strongly into the lead with an amazing sauce. Stuffed with what, you ask? With zancarrón, of course! That apparently translates to “shank“. It’s all beef to me.

From El Guti, we went to El Emperador, but they had just sold their last pincho. But we still had a drink there. From there, we went to a new bar called El Sinfo, where we were given the last two pinchos they had prepared that day.

SINFO: A pretty weak ham + egg + mayo salad open-faced sandwich on oil-drenched fried bread. Disappointing.

On Saturday, we headed out for a night of pinchos, first to El Emperador, where we had been denied the night before. I accidentally ordered “two pinchos” rather than “one of each”, because I hadn’t noticed that they had two available. While we were getting served, we got a phone call inviting us to a friend’s house for dinner, so we only got in one pincho on Saturday.

EMPERADOR1: A tasty, if sweet and fatty, entry from El Emperador: foie with an apple puree and vermouth sauce.

On Sunday, the last day of the festival, we made it to four more bars and five more pinchos. First, we went to a restaurant we like called El Curro. The name of this bar is clever because it is a slang word for “work”, kind of like “salt mines” is in English. So when your wife asks you, “¿Qué tal en el curro?“, or when you say, “Lo siento, cariño, pero tengo que irme al curro.“, you can cheekily be referring to the bar.

CURRO1: The entry from El Curro was a layered pastry filled with foie, in a port sauce with raisins, drizzled with caramel and dusted with powdered sugar. This was by far the best pincho we tried.

I loved the pattern of caramel drizzle on my plate.

Two doors down from El Curro is El Charles. The former is very elegant and cleanly decorated. The latter is quite dingy and makes you wonder if they’ve cleaned the tables lately.

CHARLES: The entry from El Charles was a dish of peppers stuffed with cod fish with a little caviar on top. Very fishy. It was better than we expected from the environment, but still one of the lower contenders in the competition.

Finally we walked across town to Cafetería Nikos for their two pinchos.

NIKOS1: Toasted bread topped with smoked salmon, faux angula eels, a cherry tomato, and caviar. The spices (basil and oregano?) on the tomatoes were lovely, and the fishy middle was very good.

NIKOS2: A pastry cup filled with crab, tuna, onion, and pink sauce. Good, but nothing special.

Later, we went to Cafetería Berna, but they were serving their last pinchos when we arrived, so we ordered a plate of calamari to share, thus removing any need for lunch upon returning home. The calamari was excellent and the pinchos we saw had an excellent presentation, so Cafetería Berna might have ranked highly.

That’s it. The party’s over.

Our official awards are as follows:

Bronze metal: NIKOS1
Silver metal: GUTI2
Gold metal: CURRO1

You can follow the official voting on the Semana del Pincho website. We had a great time and are looking forward to participating next year. Hopefully everyone will do a better job of estimating demand and will prepare enough to last each day. It’s very disappointing to hear that you just missed the last one.

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I have a friend spending this Thanksgiving in Meadows of Dan, Virginia.

A picture outside trying to get the blue color of the bottle. Apparently they sell t-shirts.

Held up to the sun.

Blue, the dog.

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One of the best consumer item ideas I’ve seen recently is the mini champagne bottle. It’s the size and volume, 25 cl, of a normal Spanish beer bottle, smaller than what other countries use (33 cl, I think). It’s enough to completely fill one glass of champagne. You see, the problem with champagne is that, once you pop the cork on a normal bottle, you really have to drink the entire bottle, because otherwise it loses its carbonation. Between just two people, one bottle of champagne is finishable, but it will leave you both pretty tipsy. That’s why these little serving sizes are so nice. They are sold in three-packs at the local grocer.

Happy Erik celebrating Obama’s victory.

Mini Champagne bottle.

After reading an article this week about the occasional glass of wine being beneficial (something related to reducing behavioral problems in boys) during pregnancy, Marga and The Fetus were permitted a few sips of bubbly. I hope my child remembers Obama, despite his leaving office before Fetus’ eighth birthday.

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A man walks into a bar, sits on a stool and orders three glasses of wine. He proceeds to sit there by himself and drink each glass. The bartender thinks this is a bit weird, but he leaves the man alone. The man comes in the next day and does the same thing. The bartender can’t resist and has to ask why he would order all three drinks at once like that.

“My two best drinking buddies went to Germany to find work,” the man explains. “They told me I’d have to drink their wine for them until they got back.” The man continues entering the bar and ordering three glasses of wine every day for months.

One day, the man sits at the bar and orders only two drinks. The bartender is shocked! “Oh no!” says the bartender, “Did one of your friends die?”

The man says, “No, they’re both fine. But my doctor says I can’t drink alcohol anymore.”

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