Vino
Love Wine
Originally uploaded by Firenzesca. I was behind an old chap in the supermarket checkout queue in my local supermarket (El Arbol). I noticed he just had three identical bottles of wine. This in itself is not unusual, it was 2pm and folk were heading home for lunch. Then I noticed the till said €3.60. At first I thought that the checkout person had made a mistake but she hadn’t. Three bottles of wine for pennies (almost). It was young wine (joven), as opposed to the aged stuff (crianza) and probably tasted like ribena but it reminded me of how different the wine market is here.
In the UK I was used to a wine section in the supermarket being a mini world tour (with the exception of Asia) but here I haven’t seen a single bottle of non-Spanish wine for sale. Oh wait, yes I have, a half bottle of Moet Chandon in a bar. When I asked a couple of my students about this they looked at me as though they didn’t understand the question. Why would we want to drink wine from anywhere else? They said, Spanish wine’s the best in the world. I kept my counsel, and didn’t ask how they knew, if they never drank anything but Spanish wine. My Dad said, on his recent visit, that he hadn’t had a bad wine while he was here, and this was with a slight note of surprise (not that surprising really, the difference between a Rioja on sale in the UK and what they drink here is marked). Even the first glass (white, in the Airport cafe, costing less than €1.50) was more than acceptable.
The other thing is the price. Wine here is cheap. Not that the wine tastes cheap, no. You struggle to pay more than €5 a bottle in the supermarket and the bars where they do wine rather than beer, even the expensive wines are €2 a glass, and that’s often with nibbles. It’s a fine sight to see in a bar, lunchtime or evening, blokes who, in England, would be on pints, sitting at the bar sipping a glass of something red and picking at a tiny dish of octopus.
Tags: drink, living
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