Today I woke up to Mike’s 7:30 alarm knowing full well neither of us were going to get up until 8:30. After a little while I decided to do a four mile out and back from our hotel in Plaça d’Espanya over to the Olympic park. After going up a decently sized hill, I ran past beautiful views of the city, dog walkers, and past athletic fields for rugby, cricket, football, tennis, as well as a big track. I got back in time for a quick shower and breakfast at the hotel.
At 10:00 we headed out for a bus tour of the city. A local Barcelona guide named Anna joined us to tell us about the history of the area Afterwards we got out and walked the streets past La Pedrera and Casa Battlo, getting to see it on foot. A lot of the cool buildings we passed on the bus trip along with sculptures and parks were built for the 1929 World’s Fair and for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
After some pictures of these places, we headed to lunch. At the restaurant we had some delicious tapas and then fish for the entree. I’ve really gotten to like one tapa with the tomato sauce and olive oil on grilled bread and another one with fried eggplant discs. I also tried mussels for the first time which were surprisingly good despite the appearance and smell.
When we finished our meals, we headed over to the home of Freixenet Cava, where we got a tour of the wine cellars and learned the process of how the sparkling wines were made and the development of the process over the years. From what I can remember, the cava starts with 3+ types of top-quality grapes (for different types of cava) that are grown in this region. The different types of grapes are best grown at certain altitudes in the region, and the soil helps largely in the development of the quality of grapes, with the amount of clay helping contain the rainwater. They mentioned that they don’t irrigate the fields and just let nature do its work. They pick the grapes in the later summer months, although due to global warming and increasing temperatures, the times for harvest have been premature, with the last 2 years being the earliest on record.
The next step in the cava making process is to crush the grapes (now industrially) in large containers where the first big squeeze produced 60% of the “grape juice.” This is the top-quality stuff they use for wine making, with the aromas and flavors they are looking for. The next squeeze gets most of the rest of it, which isn’t as good quality, so they sell it to distilleries and other companies for making alcohol and other drinks. The next step is adding sugar and their own yeast to the large containers and letting it sit for a while to ferment.
To make sparkling wine however, they put the liquid in the bottles, and let it sit again for some number of months to let the yeast do its thing allowing no air to escape. The yeast will eventually collect and clump together, creating “lees” (a sediment) which has to be taken out before they can sell the bottles. They have a shaking/shifting/rotating process to separate it out from the liquid keeping it at the end near the lid of the bottle while the liquid is in the bottom. They have an automated process now done by machines that can do a hundred bottles in only 3 hours per machine when it used to be a few days or weeks for 2 bottles done by hand.
The part of the bottle with the lees are then suspended in ice water until it freezes and then (also automated now and less tedious than by hand) the bottle is opened, and the lees are removed, then it’s recapped without losing any of the cava. Also, the wine was previously stored underground because it has a constant temperature required for optimal fermentation, which is about 50-55 degrees Fahrenheit.
They make several million bottles a year and were the first sparkling wine to sell internationally. Freixenet is a big supplier to the the US as well, and I assume it’s popular. After the tour we got to taste two of their most popular Cavas. I’m not a fan of alcohol so I didn’t particularly like it, but learning the process was interesting.
In the evening we headed over to the Olympic stadium for the Champions League fixture between FC Barcelona and runners up in the French Ligue 1 last year, Brest. Lamine Yamal was out with an injury, but early in the match Lewandowski, the Barca striker (#9) converted a penalty to make it 1-0 early. Barca went on in the second half to score two more through Dani Olmo and another from Lewandowski. It was a great result for Barca overall and a great spectacle, but I was also in a bit of a dampened mood after I saw that my team Manchester City, who were playing at the same time, had blown their 3-0 halftime lead and tied Dutch side Feyenoord 3-3, bringing the City winless streak to 6 (but technically breaking a 5 game losing streak).
I also enjoyed seeing everyone wearing Barca merch at the match. Ramy wore his lucky Lewandowski shirt, and Daniel had a smooth all black Barca hat and a dual scarf commemorating the day. Overall it was a very fun day and I to see my very first UCL game, which was something I won’t forget!
