Visit three Harrows, two Harrows in England and Haro in Spain

Depending on where you live, you might know one of these three Harrows before you get to hear of the other two.


Harrow-on-the-Hill in north west London has the famous historic Harrow School. You can take tours of the school. Photograph the statue of Queen Elizabeth on the wall. Maybe see boys wearing boaters (straw hats) in summer. Browse along the dinky shops and restaurants.

Harrow station is at the bottom of the hill in the middle of the busy shopping area. Department store, Marks and Spencer, St George's indoor mall with the friezes of St George high up inside, so high you could go there for years and never notice them. Pedestrian area beyond.  The station has two exits.

You can reach it on the Metropolitan train from Baker Street station. The Baker Street station is near Madame Tussauds and the statue of Sherlock Holmes and the Sherlock Holmes shop and museum.

If you are 'tired of London', as Samuel Johnson said, but not 'tired of life' as he suggested, take a jaunt

Harrow at Little Bedwyn is best reached by car. You can drive there from London and arrive in time for lunch, and be back in London for the evening.

Harrow at little Bedwyn is an expensive gourmet restaurant. Well worth the travel if you like that sort of thing. Go there for a special occasion. (A remote, small quiet, calm, countryside place, elegant - not for singing and dancing. If you don't want a birthday with balloons and crowds clapping, and all that fuss makes you cringe, you might prefer this discreet place.)

If you are watching your budget, get on their mailing list and look for the out of season offers in January or February.

The Joneses who run the Harrow and food and wine buffs. You can have a multi-course meal, and, if budget and health allow it, and being passenger or driver, heavy drinker or light sipper or professional spitter and taster, a set of matching wines.

Haro
Looking ahead to warmer summer weather, you might visit Haro in Northern Spain, the city at the centre of the Rioja region, mostly red, but also Rioja cava (which means cave) which is white. Look up Vina (there should be nya tilda over the n) Tondonia. We spent a happy holiday touring the vineyards. Some of the vineyards run tours which you have to book well in advance. Others are mass-appeal places which have a shop and constant tours.

So, there you have it, three 'harrows' two spelled Harrow and one Haro.

Useful Websites
Samuel Johnson Quotation
http://www.samueljohnson.com/tiredlon.html

Spanish Tourist Board
https://www.spain.info/en_GB/

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

See my other posts on Harrow on the Hill, the harrow at little Bedwyn and Haro. I also have reviews all over the net, on Facebook and Tripadvisor. Searches may bring up something I have forgotten which has great photos.

"Who took a cork out of my lunch?" Champagne. In victory you deserve it, in defeat you need it

WINE QUOTATIONS
"Who took the cork out of my lunch?" That is my near miss quote of W C Fields. However, he probably made the same joke every time he started his act and got quoted or misquoted many times. You see lots of versions of his quotation. So mine is as good as the next. Very apt for the World Travel market where I tried many wines. In this post I shall tell you some chatty stuff about World Travel Market but also where to try wines on tours around the world.

Like so many exhibitions, at WTM you are offered wines and spirits, totally unsuitable for visitors who have to walk around stand all day, walk home up and down stairs not he London underground or tube, and keep their wits about them for negotiating. I would like to suggest to organisers a rule that before 6 pm your stand can serve only wines up to 4 per cent alcohol, which would mean beer and the wine I have recently discovered, Lambrusco, 4 per cent.

My other favourite quotation is about Champagne. 'In victory you deserve it, in defeat you need it.' Napoleon. I tried a lot of wines at World Travel Market in Excel in London. I didn't like any of them. (Which is funny because last year and the year before I had some delicious wines from central Europe, the new tourist countries, like Croatia and Serbia.)

COFFEE
My fondest memory is of being able to revive my energy with the Greek coffee on the Greek stand. (Of course a similar coffee was on the nearby Turkish stand called Turkish coffee.)

WINE EXPERT VIEW ON cool northern and southern regions
I wanted to try new wines at the World Travel Market. From which countries and regions? Back home and on the phone I keep consulting my family wine expert (who achieved level 3 of the Wine and Spirit Education Trust exams - from Jan 1st the letters will change from AIWS associate of the institute of wine and spirits - it will be changed) to something people at first will not know and recognise. My home expert is now doing exams in level 4 - two exams were yesterday in the middle of the World Travel Market. )

 I have only done level one which was 20 hours of studying from the manual and a six hour day of demos, slides and tastings). I was thrilled to bits (excuse the cliche it's too early in the morning to invent new metaphors) to find my exam was an NVQ.  About half the people on my course were in the wine trade already, either as sommeliers or trainees in restaurants or hoping to go into the business or working in wine shops, retail wholesale or marketing.

At home my tame wine expert says you are more likely to find the best wines at a wine fair for experts. However, for relative novices like me World Travel Market is a good introduction to new wines and products from around the world. Especially as I want to see what is offered to the tourist in terms of winery tours.

What did I leave until last ? Places I already know and have visited: Champagne in France (I wrote an article for Take Break magazine, a lovely double page spread. Their house style was to start with a quotation and end with three tips. That's a great style for any travel article.)

In north the west London a recently opened restaurant and bar is called Pizza and Prosecco.

PROSECCO
I went to the Italian stand and had a long chat with a lady from the Prosecco region. I asked which wineries offered tastings. She looked puzzled and told me they all do. She found me a route from Heathrow to Italy on a budget airline (every stand I visited to my amazement it was the same story. The first place mentioned was not the capital city and the national airline but the regional airport and one of the budget airlines - even when the destination was a five star hotel.) So good news for travellers. Spend less on the airfare and more to spare for the hotel, restaurant and tours.

What did I miss?
 I wanted to see Lambrusco. It comes from the north  of Italy where whether is cooler, just as Champagne is from the north of France. Tasmania off Australia is also a slightly cooler region which has a wine industry. Rich tropical wines don't make good sparklers. You need crisp acidic white wine.

Americans have devised a formula for the number of days of sun you need. The EU also has six or seven zones based on another formula, and rules on how much sugar you add in the north or in the south the acid . I know it sounds like something you can't drink. But it is tartaric acid equivalent, the domestic version is cream of tartar, the second most common acidic M a l i c which you find in apples. (The one in lemons is c i t r i c  a c i d.)

Wine tours and shops
I have already done extensive tours including wineries of the USA and Canada, France and Europe, Cyprus, South Africa and New Zealand. If you want supermarket size shops selling everything thing for those who drink wine or don't, the place is California north of San Francisco where one year my family drove for a day or two visiting winery after winery. In Europe for Champagne the big tours of the cellars are in Rheims and so popular you often need to book tours.

In South Africa and Australia wineries are all countryside and more natural and family run and tours  and tastings and souvenirs are hit and miss. Restaurants at vineyards where you might see a souvenir or buy a bottle. Not the huge tourist attractions with crowded supermarkets.

Spain - Rioja, has a wine museum out of the main town of Haro but on the wine trail, and it has an excellent restaurant, a big tour, a huge supermarket with everything from books and cards and tee towels and aprons and ear rings and table mats and coasters and so on, decorated with bunches of grapes, and bottle openers and more. Everything you need for yourself as a souvenir or an amusing yet useful gift for the people next door who while you are travelling will water your plants and reliably feed your cat, drag out the dustbins and answer the post and or the house sitters who say boo to burglars.

Another great place for wine tours is Malta.

Plus of course England where the big place with the supermarket and restaurant and outdoor tour (in season) and indoor tour is Denbies. (I have several previous posts on wine tours.)

In London the food and drink business is really humming. You can enjoy wine tastings at many restaurants in central London and around the country.Wine shops have Enoteca machines offering small tastings for £1 or more or free with a card you stick in a slot in a machine displaying half a dozen wines.Why don't the wine regions have Enoteca machines at the World Travel Market!

Next year World Travel Market will be at Excel November Monday 7th to Wednesday 9th 2016 at ExCel in East London on the DLR (Docklands Light Railway). Please follow my posts and like my pages and follow me on Facebook or link to me on LinkedIn.

Angela Lansbury, freelance travel writer and photographer.

Afterthoughts on Gilbert's Restaurant in Grimsdyke Hotel, What's Good - and translating the wine bottle label

Our server ran after us when we left to give us the wine bottle and cork we'd accidentally left behind, after we'd spent a lot of time studying the bottle and photographing it and asking for the cork.

We visited the Rioja wine region in northern Spain a year or two back. We had visited visited the town of Haro, which sounds like Harrow in north west London.

Rioja produces mainly red wine. (Easy to remember, R for Rioja, r for red.) Looking at the wine label you can read the producer's name, Ugate. Precedente de vinedos propios. Preceding or coming from. De is from or of in both French and Spanish. Vin obviously someone to do with wine or winery. Prop ... as proprietor or owner.

Crianza is merely basic, like vin ordinaire, ordinary wine, kept maturing a while in both the bottle and barrel for about 3-5 years, that is to say, it could be some of the time in barrel then some more maturing in the bottle, adding up to the minimum permitted age of 5 years. That time is set by the local wine authority to ensure a minimum standard of quality that the buyer can expect, a guarantee of quality.

(Unlike the French Beaujolais nouveau which is drunk straight from the same year's harvest, the new wine from this year.) 

So Criantha at least was thought worth spending the time and money on storing so it aged and developed. But not kept so long that you have to pay high prices.

cosecha translates as vintage or age

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cosecha

So the age or birthday or harvest of this wine was 2010. It's now five years old in 2015.

Ugarte is a Spanish surname, and the meaning? It is Basque language for island.

Angela Lansbury B A Honours, author, travel writer and photographer, speaker.

Armchair travel to Rioja's Gehry Marques de Riscal hotel

Opening a bottle of red Rioja from one of the bodegas we had not visited on our tour around Haro in the Rioja region, I decided to do an armchair tour and find out if you can see this vineyard/bodega.

The eye catching colourful Marques de Riscal hotel was on our list of must see places but it was full as well as having rooms beyond our budget. The hotel is designed by Frank Gehry, the award winning Canadian-American architect. He also designed the riverside avant garde Guggenheim Art museum over in the big city of Bilbao. His other designs include those in Canada and the USA.

Wikipedia lists: Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles; Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, France; MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Vontz Center for Molecular Studies on the University of Cincinnati campus; Experience Music Project in Seattle; New World Center in Miami Beach; Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; the Vitra Design Museum and the museum MARTa Herford in Germany; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Cinémathèque française in Paris; and 8 Spruce Street in New York City.

Photo of Guggenheim Museum from Wikipedia. See Wikipedia for details.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Gehry

This hilltop hotel has wavy rooflines at several levels, perhaps offering some shade in summer, and terraces and picture windows overlooking the vineyards stretching for miles.

Here is the hotel. You can see the resemblance to the museum by the same architect.

Watching the 360 degree constantly revolving panorama I seemed to be breathing the fresh mountaintop air. Perhaps it was just the tawny old wine I had sipped.

Shivering in cold England, you can dream you are in the cool hotel. Take a tour around the spa, hotel bedrooms, restaurants. I must admit our first reaction to the exterior which outdoes the Sydney opera house, was, that doesn't work for me. I started with the bedrooms and found them rather stark. One restaurant picture, red and white also didn't do it for me. The spa was interesting, with its floor to ceiling views over the countryside. Then suddenly the pictures started picking me up. The red and white restaurant with the curvy chairs and the carpet with the swirls.

Do have a look. If you are cool at home, you can imagine the cool of the hotel, if you are warm and cosy at home, you can imagine sitting on their garden terrace on a hot day.

According to the side you can book a vineyard tour but it's not clear what you see. The other things that confused me was the name City of Wine. My first thought was, that met be Haro. Then, looking further, it seems that the hotel is the centre of a complex elsewhere.

On our last trip we stayed in Haro, which has several vineyards offering shops and tours. In Haro we were in Hotel Augustine in a historic converted religious building.

We splurged one night at the booked almost every day hillside Hotel Viura, in Aleva, also very avant garde and quite a drive. We passed the wonderful museum of wine which has a garden alongside the car park displaying different grape varieties as well as a supermarket size shop, a smart restaurant and a bar serving delectable morsels.

We visited in Haro several wineries, including Muga, Lopez de Heredia, La Rioja Alta. They have the wine tastings, tours and shops. We also drove out of town to Contino in Laserna and  Finca Allende in quaint little hillside Briones. I have reviewed in Tripadvisor the two hotels I stayed at and I have some blog posts on the vineyards.

Photos of wine bottle by Angela Lansbury. Copyright Angela Lansbury.

Notice the cage on the wine bottle. I have heard two stories about the cage. One is that it is put over bottles, especially sparkling wines such as Champagne, to ensure the cork does not pop out in the cellar or the restaurant, wasting the wine and even injuring somebody. Another story is that the cages were added to prevent fraudulent refilling of bottles with prestige labels.

In England you can buy Rioja wine include Marques de Riscal just about everywhere you can think of, such as Majestic, and online at Bid for wine. No need to think, because when you go onto their website pop-up ads appear for all the suppliers of the wine.

Next trip to Spain we can follow the Rioja Route and see this award winning Marques de Riscal hotel. Meanwhile I and you can enjoy the view on their website.

http://www.360vista-studio.com/marquesderiscal360/

See my later posts on architect Gehry's Dancing House in Prague, Czech Republic, and museum in Paris, France.

Spanish Wine Labels - What do they tell you?

SPANISH WINE LABEL - RIOJA

Spanish - English  

vinos - wines

finos  - fine ones (plural adjective matching plural noun)

de - of

vina - wine

Haro - main town in the Rioja area - see my hotel review on Tripadvisor

alta - high, as in high altitude

y - and

vinedos - vineyards

bodegas - wine cellar(s) (or grocery stores)

Madrid - capital city of Spain

fundada - founded

en - in

To translate labels go to the winery website and click on the union Jack top right of screen to convert text to English or try website google translate and copy into the box a word or phrase or longer section from the label 

translate.google.com

(I'm adding more labels from other countries so come back to this post over the weekend)

Some wines are made in the traditional oak barrels which add a distinctive flavour. You can take tours and see how they make barrels. 

For more about wine see wikipedia Rioja wines.

Rioja [ˈrjoxa] is a wine region, with Denominación de Origen Calificada (D.O.Ca. Qualified designation of origin) named after La Rioja, in Spain. Rioja is made from grapes grown not only in the Autonomous Community of La Rioja, but also in parts of Navarreand the Basque province of Álava. Rioja is further subdivided into three zones: Rioja Alta, Rioja Baja and Rioja Alavesa.

denominacion - denomination (naming)

de - of

origen - origin

calificada - qualified

alta

baja

For touring around the area see:

http://winetourismspain.com/wine-tourism/rioja/