FALLING IN LOVE WITH WINE & RONDA
“Brutal Charm.”
After a refreshing few days in Nerja, we continued our journey through Southern Spain to a winery called Bodega Bentomiz. This beautiful and delicious winery is located 7 miles up steep and winding roads.
Wine Cellars at Bodega Bentomiz
Seems like a bad idea to place a winery at the top of such a steep road…
As we climbed up the mountain, the scenery looked more and more like driving inland from Malibu, California with chaparral terrain, mountain range in front and sea behind us. We arrived at the winery and immediately felt like we were in Napa, because the building was completely modern and our tour guide was British.
Side note: One interesting thing about Southern Spain is that the grapes do not grow up on vines but practically touch the ground. The plants don’t really look like traditional grape plants at all, more like little tiny bushes. This is because in part, the terrain is so steep, and in part because the sun is so intense that they don’t want to take too much of the sugar out of the grapes.
Cheers!
The wines we tasted were complex and delicious and are served at a few Michelin Star Restaurants including El cellar de Can Roca which won the award for Best Restaurant in the world in both 2013 and 2015. We decided to stay afterwards for the chef’s tasting menu with a wine pairing. Since I was driving, and since I am a responsible human, Allie got the additional wine for the tasting and I just had a sip or two of hers to get the “full tasting experience.”
Sipping on Moscato
I had never understood wine pairing until this meal. I used to think that wine pairings were meant to simply compliment the food you were eating. But this chef’s tasting helped me understand that a good wine pairing should be a continuation of the food – not just a compliment. It was an incredible experience to take a bite of tuna steak and then take a sip of Moscat and have your taste buds tell you that these two things were meant to be together. Needless to say, the food was incredible: Tuna steak served with tomatoes, pork cheek served with mushrooms, and for dessert a cream with freshly puréed mango. Bon Appetite!
All in all, we spent about 4 hours in this gorgeous winery talking with other guests and discussing Oregon wines with the chef. It was such a lovely afternoon.
With bellies full of food and a lot of water, we set out to our next destination: Ronda. We took the highway through honey-colored fields. We passed random castles with stark mountains in the distance. We listened to good music and sang along.
Punete Nuevo
Our charming Air BnB
We arrived at Ronda about an hour before sunset. Ronda is an amazing town built in 6 BC on a hill overlooking quilt-like patterns of olive tree farms and green fields. The city itself is divided by one impressive bridge called the Puente Nuevo (aka “New Bridge”). It was built in 1837, so by Spanish standards that must be new. Regardless of the name, the bridge is one of the most impressive architectural structures I’ve seen. You can hike down to get a look at the bridge – and the entrance to the hike was right next to our Air BnB.
Entrance to the hike to views of Puente Nuevo
The town is on either side of the bridge, which stands at 390 ft tall and has a large waterfall at the bottom of it. Our Air Bnb looked out into the valley and also had views of the bridge. It was also next to the most lovely courtyard with a sparkling fountain, pink and red flowering trees, and even a Spanish guitarist playing in the center of it all.
View from the Top of the Bridge of the City of Ronda
Breakfast with a view at our Air Bnb
It seemed that around every corner we turned, there was another picturesque house with shutters that matched the flower boxes. It reminded me of the town from Beauty and the Beast and felt like fairy tale.
For dinner we ate at a restaurant situated on the cliff right next to the Puente Nuevo. The bridge was lit up against the night sky and we could hear the waterfall hundreds of feet below us. The whole little town was lit up like a Thomas Kincade painting and we sipped wine and split a steak.
Eating under the lights of the Puente Nuevo
One un-fairytalelike thing happened shortly after we arrived in Ronda. There was no parking at our Air Bnb, but our host had told us that there was usually parking around the corner of the square near our place. So I told Allie to relax in at the Air Bnb and I would go park the car just a few hundred feet away. I turned down the street as instructed, but quickly realized a) there was no parking and b) the street was getting narrower and narrower. After unsuccessfully attempting to turn around (there wasn’t enough space and I was like Austin Powers with the golf-cart), I decided to just reverse down this very narrow alley on uneven cobblestone with cars on either side of me.
This picture does not do justice to how narrow the streets are
I was inching down and all of a sudden a horse-drawn carriage comes through one of the impossibly small alley-ways and the driver started yelling at me to “get out of the way.” In Spanish I told him that I was doing my best and I had nowhere to go. So he got down from his cart and continued yelling at me. At this point, I texted Allie an emergency “HELP!” text and she came right over to find the horse driver yelling and two British men watching and laughing at me. I was practically in tears because I DID NOT want to scratch this rental car in a foreign country, and I honestly didn’t know if I could back it up without hitting something. Fortunately, Allie coming to my rescue seemed to make one of the British guys step off his game and the two of them helped me back out. It was still a pretty stressful situation. The Spanish just have a different interpretation of “narrow streets” then we do!
Ronda, you are beautiful!