I’ll be the first to admit that I can only take so much wine while on a business trip. After awhile, my eyes glaze over and I feel an intense craving to either down a gin and tonic, or at the very least, stay as far as humanly possible from a fermentation tank. And god forbid if I actually start dreaming about wine, like having the winemaker lecturing me on whether one should place a single row of grapes in a bin during harvest or two. Then, there is that one nightmare where I’m chained to a long wooden table adhering labels to each bottle as a raspy female voice sounds over a speaker, “You now have 981,872 labels remaining…you now have 981,871 labels remaining… Yeah, that’s when you know that you’ve visited one too many wineries in a day!

However, over the years, I have realized that it is not so much wine that I tire of, but it’s the way in which I am enjoying it. Sitting in a tasting room with a notebook in hand and my glasses propped low on my nose, a potentially remarkable wine loses its magic. It becomes something sterile and empty, one of the millions. Something I analyze and critique with the winemaker anxiously sitting in front of me wondering if I am giving his liquid child an “A” for stellar quality or an “F” for pure plonk. And when scheduling three wineries a day, this process can get tedious rather quickly.

Hence, on our last trip to Rioja, we decided to start incorporating new ways in which we could enjoy Spanish wine, rather than solely in restaurants, cafes or …