#catalayud

Kilometers Driven: 151 

The terrain directly South of Zaragoza is very much the same as eastwards, which if you read yesterday’s post you’ll now as not exactly the world’s best tourist destination. So upon waking we made a quick morning of it and drove south west in searching of greener pastures… literally. What we were rewarded with was the discovery of the Calatayud wine route, which traverses the small towns and major wineries of the Aragon region; an unexpected and welcome treat.

For 9 months of the year, wineries tend to be a relatively quiet place, where its owners and workers calmly oversee the vines, check the gauges on fermentation vats, and populate their tasting rooms with the best of what they can afford to get rid of. October, however, is not one of these 9 months. October is picking season, and therefore bears witness to an extraordinary amount of hustle and bustle in areas otherwise silent. This, in other words, is an exciting time to be in wine country.

If you’re into wine at all, there is something inexplicably cool about seeing a 2 ton wooden crate filled to the brim with beautifully plump red wine grapes. Apart from being a gastronomical spectacle, it gives you a kind of philosophically surreal insight to how a wine might in future taste, and creates a sort of personal relationship between the liquid you drink and your understanding of the process. For you non-wine fanatics that all sounds very fluffy and all, but knowing that the fermented grape juice I’m drinking right now was picked by old-man hands and put in wood boxes instead of fancy metal pre-compressors makes it taste that much better.

Oh yeah, and the driving was beautiful! Much more like the barren hills of Sonoma than the lush valley’s of the Rhone region, speckles of forest interrupted by sweeping plateaus of agriculture made for a truly photographically intense afternoon. The evening concluded on an unmarked tractor path off a small middle-of-nowhere road with a view on the fields with a background of mountain. It sounds almost to good to be true, which is why I must fervently attest that it was in fact real, and deserves every ounce of praise I give it.