More than one year ago, I went to the famous La Rioja in a long weekend trip. This region is famous for its red wine, and it attracts a lot of tourism interested in wine. As you may expect, gastronomy was a key aspect of this trip too, although we tried to incorporate some culture into the picture.
While entering in La Rioja from Madrid, our first stop was Santo Domingo de la Calzada (A), which is part of the Camino de Santiago route, which was hosting some local festivities.
We also visited Calahorra (B), mainly because we stayed there, and we especially enjoyed Logroño (C), and its famous Laurel street. A street plenty of bars, where you can try as many different wines as you can imagine, while enjoying the tasty local food.
We could not leave the wine region without visiting one of the many wineries there, and we chose the most famous one due to its renovated architecture: Marqués de Riscal, by Frank Geary, Guggenheim’s architect, in Laguardia (D). In this visit, we went once again through the wine making process, which is always very interesting, and I always get some new insights. This time, I got to know a couple of tips for controlling the wine quality.
They control the variety of grape, the field where it is grown, and its age; and they also make sure the number of grapes per area is limited too. This winery produces 5 million Rioja bottles a year (4 of them are Reserva), and 60% of them are for the international market (that still leaves an impressive amount of 2 million bottles only in Spain!).
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Strasbourg is a French city, hosting the European Parlament, next to the Rhine river, and being a border city with Germany (is border still a valid word in the EU?). The region where it lies (Alsace) has been changing hands from the French to the Germans, and vice versa since the Romans were around. The last exchange took place in the beginning of the 20th Century, so not that long ago.
This is why Strasbourg was chosen as the host city for the European Parliament: this region has lived more wars (can you live a war? isn’t that totally impossible?) than any other region in the continent, and is therefore a perfect example of what EU is all about (in its origin: peace).
In fact, both sides of the Rhine have a massive park linked by a bridge to show this unification spirit.
Walking in the city you will notice examples proving this is one of the cities with the highest income in France: everything is clean, in perfect conservation state, and parks are full of attractions for the children and some grown-up. If you woke up in the beautiful small city centre, you would think you are in a German town for several reasons: the architecture cannot hide the German influence, it is crowded with German tourists, and even the dishes you can see in the restaurants are very similar to the food on the other side of the Rhine: Riesling wine, choucroute, flammkuchen, …
You can also find some additional signs of old installations that make a German speaking time clear.
One of the best things of this region is, without any kind of doubt, their white wine. Names as Riesling or Gewurzträminer varieties are well known for anyone who is properly advised in the wine world. There is a wine route well organized going south from Strasbourg, where you can stay as many days as you can while visiting the vineyards and tasting the different ones. We took only a part of it, and visited Obernai, where we had the opportunity to taste several wines, buy some, and have a walk around the vineyards.
If you want to take a deeper look to these cities, check the following slideshows: Strasbourg and Obernai