Jerez de la Frontera

I saved at least one day in Sevilla for a trip to Jerez de la Frontera, a small town outside Cadiz with the claim to fame of being the home of sherry, the strange dessert/not a dessert wine that Spanish and non-Spanish people approach entirely differently. While folks in the US and UK (which apparently drinks gobs of the stuff) think of sherry as a super sweet dessert wine, most Spaniards drink dry versions with afternoon snacks or appetizers. Anyway, the trip to the port cellars in Porto was one of my favorite parts from my post-college eurotrip, so I figured I’d go and learn more about it.

"The Mushrooms"

Wednesday I woke up, grabbed breakfast, and walked to the train station, passing ‘the Mushrooms’ (a super-modern complex of roofs and buildings) along the way. Caught my train and about an hour later I hopped off and tried to get oriented which, despite spending the whole day there, was something I managed to not do. I’d been planning on using a map from the guidebook to find my way to the tourism office and get a real map there, but Rick Steve failed me for once, as there was no tourism office within a two-block radius of where he said it was. I just resigned myself to using the guidebooks map, which only got me hopelessly lost 2 or 3 times.

Despite his utter betrayal of failing to provide me with an adequate map, I took Mr. Steve’s recommendation for a sherry tour and wound my way up to Sandeman’s bodega, which is one of the bigger brands of port and sherry in the States (though not that big in Spain itself). When I got there, the guy at the front desk said he wasn’t sure if there would be enough people for the next tour, so I could either come back for the next one, or just grab a seat with some sherry and wait and see if other folks showed up. I opted for the latter (it wasn’t a long wait) and he ran me through 4 different types of sherry while I noshed on some really durn tasty olives (came to find out later they were stuffed with anchovies, which I would never have guessed). Right on cue, some other folks walked in for the tour, so we were off!

A fino, two amontillados, and a sweet cream sherry. 

The tour was cool, even if it was a little disneyfied. The tour guide wore the cape and hat that Sandeman’s Zorro-like mascot wears, which I thought was a little cheesy until she explained that it’s a combination of costumes from Porto and Jerez, where Sandeman’s two businesses are. The black capes were borrowed from the traditional uniform of university students in Porto (who I saw singing and dancing for their beer money one night on the river), and the flat hat was borrowed from the horseback riders of Jerez. She walked us around the grounds for a bit (apparently you can rent them for big events, much like Chateau Ste. Michelle back in Seattle, which I thought was funny), then ran us through the process of sherry making and how it was different from other types of wine (basically boiling down to adding some brandy during the fermentation and allowing a cap of yeast to grow on top of the wine, which gives explains the extra-yeasty taste).

Sherry casks or 'butts.' Fun fact! Thanks to the name of this type of barrel,
a 'buttload' of wine is a legit measurement. It comes out to about 500 liters.

At the end was another sherry tasting, which gave me a chance to talk to the Dutch couple who constituted the aforementioned ‘other folks’ on the tour. They’d flown into Madrid and rented a car, and were driving around Andalucia for a couple of days before heading up to Barcelona. They were the third people in a row to guess my career based solely on my appearance and me saying I’m from Seattle. Not sure if that says more about me or the city… At any rate, it reminded me that Europeans and Americans have vastly different expectations of their kids, as they were absolutely boggled that I was 25 and had been out on my own for over 3 years. They said their oldest was 24 and was just starting to think about where he wanted to go. They also engaged in a bit of grumbling about their younger kids (all in their early 20s), who allegedly show no signs of moving out in the near future and still rely on their parents’ for rides around town.

Sherry tasting finished, I grabbed a nice bottle to take home as a souvenir and figured I’d check out another bodega before heading back, but alas it wasn’t meant to be. While I’m normally a fan of the laidback Mediterranean lifestyle and workdays, Jerez took it to a new extreme. All the bodegas that Rick Steve mentioned did hourly tours, but they were only open from 11 to 3, so my window was a little tiny. I picked one and started walking to it, and proceeded to get utterly turned around. The map was really more a suggestion of what I might find than an accurate reflection of reality, and I wandered back and forth in the same neighborhood for over an hour before eventually finding the place. They were quite closed by that point, so I just decided to chalk it up for a loss and grab a late lunch near the cathedral. I read in the sun for a while, then wandered back to catch a train back to Sevilla.

Scrimps.

On the way back I stopped at a restaurant near my hostel and grabbed some garlic shrimp, which were essentially unbreaded shrimp dropped into a rocket hot bowl of oil, peppers, and garlic and fried at my table. It was quite tasty, though I was squeezed in a back corner by two ENORMOUS groups of french people, so the waiter had to basically hop over chairs to get to me.

After that, you guessed it: hanging out with folks on the roof.