Browsing the Bodegas of Haro

Once we had decided to move the van we searched for nearby places to visit. There seemed little point in simply moving 3km from site to aire, we might as well do something with the day. Gill found a large car park next to a cluster of Haro's renowned Rioja bodegas. It appeared from their web sites that they were open on Sundays until mid afternoon. When we arrived it seemed bodega browsing was a popular Sunday pastime, the car park filled up quickly and a tour bus arrived.

It took us a while to work out the score. We had assumed that the bodegas' direct trade would basically be a wine shop, and though you could buy wine by the bottle and the case, the main business seemed to be 'tasting' menus.

For a fee you can opt to taste range of wines. In most places the menus were graded, so €15 would allow you to taste five 'Grand Reserve' wines - vintages from 2012 onwards. For €40 you could do the same, but sample wines almost 20 years old, some on sale for over €60 per bottle. I can see the attraction if you enjoy fine wines, you would get to appreciate a range of delights without having to pay for a whole bottle.

We were not tempted by the deal. Partly for practical reasons. I was driving and Gill would have been drinking alone, which is a bit sad really. Also, it was scarcely past noon, we don't really do day time drinking these days. The main reason though is although we love wine, we are not connoisseurs but ardent amateurs, enthusiastic consumers. We would much rather share a bottle in the sunshine than sip samples in the darkened hallows of a tasting room. We bought a couple of bottles, but spent most of our time wandering around outside taking photos of the buildings.

The scale of these bodegas is impressive, these are large scale undertakings, yet their products are not bland or uniform which is so often the case when processes are scaled-up. They reminded us of the big Champagne houses in Reims, or the big Port producers. So far as I could work out the growers are grape producers and the bodegas buy from them - to what extent the big companies also own or have a stake the vineyards was not clear. This is a different model to much of the French wine industry where there still many individual wine makers who own a few hectares of vines, or Caves Cooperatives providing crushing and bottling facilities for small scale growers who co-own the facility. The socialist in me prefers the latter system, but both produce good wine.

Maybe we will come back here one day and try one of the tasting menus, it would be fun. We do appreciate that by drinking solely what used to be called 'country wines' we miss out the subtlety and complexity of the great vintages. I suppose one solution would be to reduce the amount we consume and buy fewer bottles of a higher quality. Maybe this is something we could do at home, where the quality of inexpensive supermarket wines is fairly dreadful and the price for vintage wines in the UK and abroad is broadly similar. This plan has the distinct advantage of being aspirational, requiring no immediate change to our current drinking habits. All is good.

We drove back to Casalarreina and parked in the aire. We managed to pick a spot next to the municipal sports hall. After an hour of listening to echoing whoops and resounding thumps - five-a-side football we surmised - we went for a walk, retracing on foot part of the route cycled yesterday. The woods were looking less magical today, no yellow shafts of sunlight through the trees, it is overcast, rain forecast for tonight, and chilly, ten degrees colder than yesterday.