Spanish Wine

Last night I went with my friend Karen to a Spanish wine workshop.  I know very little about Spanish wine, and when I got the announcement from the Barcelona Women’s Network—the Ladies Who Lunch—it seemed like a good idea.  And it was.  I now know the difference between cava and champagne, that Spanish wines are made to drink when they are sold (you don’t cellar them), and that two regions near Priorat make Priorat-like wines that are very good and much less expensive than Priorat.  This was good news to me, since I really like Priorat.  I also learned that the vast majority of Spain’s cava is produced less than an hour from Barcelona.  So I’m planning a field trip.

The workshop was run by a woman named Oksana who is Ukrainian and has lived in Barcelona for a year.  She beamed as she introduced herself and told us that her wine education workshops are her “passion business,” and that she is setting out on a new road.  In fact, our workshop was only her second one.  She was terrific—knowledgeable, thorough, interesting.  I love it when people follow their hearts instead of their heads and do what they really want to do.  And, I think there’s a market for wine workshops here. I had actually done some sniffing around to find one a couple of months ago, with no luck.

I spent much of today trying to get my head back into a paper that I started a long, long time ago and abandoned when dean duties took over. Unfortunately, I think it might be a load of crap.  I’m giving it until the end of the week to percolate and decide if it’s salvageable.