Wine and Paella

Filed in archive Wine Tours on April 20, 2007

Seafood, rice, more seafood, and wine - this dish has me written all over it. I'm sorry to say, though, that I've never really had "true" Paella. Version of it, yes, but the real thing has yet to escape me. This article, Paella pan cooks up vacation, offers a few recipes to consider as well as some winery tour information if you ever get lucky enough to head over to Barcelona:

A day later, I received an e-mail from a representative of her family's vineyard, The Torres Winery, located just outside of Barcelona. In addition to a list of suggested restaurants, the note included an invitation for an escorted tour of the winery, followed by dinner. Gratefully I accepted.

[...] Finally the day of our Torres Winery tour arrived. At 10 a.m. a sleek gray Mercedes arrived at the hotel to take us an hour outside Barcelona to the winery. We were greeted warmly by Miguel Torres Jr., nephew of Marimar Torres and Marc Perello Colomer, our gracious host.

The tour was fascinating not only because of the family's long history in wine-making (the winery has been in the same family since the 1800s) - demonstrated vividly in the excellent museum - but because of the winery's emphasis on ecologically sound production processes and techniques, such as minimizing use of pesticides and weed killers.

The tour finale was a superb lunch at Mas Rabell, their restaurant in a 14th-century farmhouse. Three wine glasses had been set before us for the first course along with a printed menu. Our host Marc poured white wines in each glass, describing each, as we sampled them along with delicate angel hair pasta in a red fish stock made of saffron and sweet red pepper, tossed with pieces of squid.

I looked around and managed to find a web site for The Torres Winery, just in case you also want to make reservations.