Everyone is reflective when they turn 60

I was never bothered by turning 40, or even 50, but 60 had me twisted in knots. When the day came this past week, I felt like I had crossed some kind of Rubicon, passing from one side of youth to the other side of old age, like I had passed some point of no return, at least metaphorically, as I headed into the final third.

I felt it was important to mark the occasion, and I had a plan. It involved waking up someplace new, preferably close to another wine region from my list. Kind of like birders who maintain a life-long list of the birds they have seen in person, wine geeks hope to visit as many of the world’s wine regions to see and taste things in person. I had decided on Barcelona, only an hour away from Nice by plane, and I opted for the Priorat region, home to world famous powerful red wines made from Garnacha and Cariñena.

I already knew a little about Barcelona, hearing things about it from family members who had raved, but also from YouTube, which were not always good things, mostly regarding an anti-tourist sentiment that is supposedly pervasive. After spending a shortened week there, I’ve concluded that Barcelona is one of the great cities of the world. I absolutely loved it, and I was rather unhappy that I had to leave.

Barcelona is full of details that delight the eye

During the five days we were in Barcelona we walked almost 30 miles and we felt very comfortable traversing the broad avenues and small, high-walled alleyways of the old city. We stayed in L’Eixample, in the city center, green with old trees and plants, fabulous architecture, etched walls, balconies, and tall glass Art Nouveau doors revealing marble lobbies and iron elevators. The food was varied and outstanding, with thousands of restaurants, most of them full of young people sitting outside well past midnight. This means they weren’t at home watching TV or sitting somewhere doom scrolling on their phones.

The tasting menu at Mont Bar in Barcelona

Rice ice cream sandwich with seaweed and caviar

We ate at a Michelin starred restaurant, Mont Bar, to celebrate my birthday, and I was able to drink a bottle of the famed Vega Sicilia, a Spanish wine made of Tempranillo and a bit of Merlot. They served us eighteen little courses of creative and delicious food, which sounds like a lot, but most of them disappeared in a single bite followed by surprise and delight. On another evening, we went to Publico, a Catalan restaurant, and we ate Iberico Ham for the first time. I had read or seen plenty about these famous black pigs that eat a special kind of acorn, and I understood what all the fuss was about now. It isn’t “porky” at all, rather the thinly shaved meat with white ribbons of glossy fat melted like butter in our mouths, the meat was sweet and nutty. We walked to the port one morning and stopped for a delicious seafood lunch in Barceloneta, in front of the marina, where a football-field-length yacht was docked. We tried to guess how much is cost to fill it with fuel and figured that’s why it stays stationary most of the time. We discovered that Barcelona takes its coffee seriously and I had forgotten how good that can be. France is ambivalent towards coffee, it seems, instead focusing all its energy on baguettes and croissants. It’s fine, but it isn’t like what we’ve had in Italy or Barcelona. And to my delight, I noticed lots of people drinking wine in Barcelona, which made me happy because the news out there in the wine press is that young people have stopped drinking it. Thankfully, not in Barcelona.

We walked in three of the city’s tree-lined parks, visited the Picasso Museum in the old part of the city. I have mentioned in previous posts that I am not the biggest fan of Picasso, but this museum changed my mind because we learned so much of his history and saw works from so many periods of his life, only to realize how groundbreaking he was to modern art. We also went to the spectacular Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, perched high on a hill with views of the entire city. There, I discovered two other Spanish painters, Ramon Casas and Joaquim Mir, that I never knew.

LLuis Masriera Rosés - Sota l'Ombrella (Under the Parasol) - c 1920

Font Ornamental in Barcelona’s Parc de la Ciutadella

La Nit, by sculptor Vicenç Navarro Romero (1888-1979)

There are two important things about Barcelona that you must know. The first is that the tomatoes are on another level. The people of Catalunya eat them at every meal, breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and with raw garlic, olive oil, and a touch of sea salt. They don’t seem real because they are so sweet and flavorful, the essence of tomato, like eating the sun. I couldn’t stop eating them. The second thing is that we were welcomed by the people of Barcelona warmly. Everyone spoke English, everyone. The tourist-hate drama is isolated and overblown so you can ignore it.

For some, Barcelona is synonymous with FCB Barcelona, and we saw enough people wearing jerseys there to confirm this, but I think it’s the architect and designer, Antoní Gaudi, that comes to mind for most everyone else. What I had seen in media of his famous works seemed a bit silly to my eye, those curves, bright colors, twisted iron, and lack of symmetry attacked my mid-20th century sense of order. The first thing we did when we got off the plane was to drop our suitcases at the hotel and walk straight to one of his most famous designs, Casa Battló, which was only a few blocks away. When confronted with its façade, I immediately thought, “Oh, I get it now.” The organic, plant-like, columns, curved windows, skull-like balconies, the incredible use of blues and greens in tiles and glass. I put myself into the shoes of a passerby seeing it for the first time in 1904 and considered just how radical it must have looked. It still does, frankly, but its freshness is welcomed today whereas I can only imagine the vitriol 120 years ago.

From there we walked a few more blocks to Gaudí’s residential masterpiece, La Pedrera, often referred to as Casa Milà, an entire apartment building built around a series of inverted hanging arches (wrap you head around that one) that included designed furniture pieces, moldings, doors, balconies, and a spectacular Disneyesque rooftop. We toured one of the apartments decorated from the time of its construction, which was completed in 1912, then upstairs to the building’s attic, where the weight-bearing arches made of brick could be seen, and then finally to the rooftop. Minds blown. It became very clear to us over the five days that Barcelona was a city that was largely redesigned during the Art Nouveau period, Gaudí being the leading architect and designer in Spain, and there are beautiful examples of this in the doorways, balconies, and windows of the buildings in the city center. When I think of the curved plant-like motifs of the Art Nouveau, I always think of Vienna, or of William Morris in England, or the 120-year-old brasseries of Paris, but Barcelona deserves its place right there with them. Chien-hui said Barcelona felt like the very best of Paris and Mexico City combined and that has stuck with me.

From La Pedrera, we walked a few more blocks to the motherload of Gaudí, the Basílica de la Sagrada Familía, the catholic cathedral that he spent forty years of his life working on but still isn’t completed 100 years after his death. We had a small private tour arranged that turned out to be a large group. The guide, a middle-aged Spaniard with a heavy accent, was very religious and dosed us with a lot of Jesus, or as he said, “the Shee-zeus,” but not much in the way of architecture. A lot of older people (I better watch how I use that phrase now.) in our group seemed perfectly fine with that, but I sort of wondered off to make photographs, his stories of the bible found my earpiece no matter how far away I got. Luckily, we had just visited two other Gaudí masterpieces, which did dive deeply into his architecture, so I felt educated. Honestly, I wasn’t prepared for this building. It was stunning, the first view from the street while still several blocks away challenged my credulity, the sheer size, the multiple spires and towers, the embedded sculptures, the ever-present crane. But most spectacular of all was still waiting for us inside. The volume soars, the stained glass and the light, the pillars and stairs, the modern sculpture and materials used. I don’t know that I’ll ever forget it.

The big day had arrived, and on the morning of my 60th, we were picked up at 8:00 a.m. by our tour guide, and sommelier, Anthony, who is a Brit, but who has lived in Barcelona for 33 years. We made the two-hour drive south of Barcelona along the Mediterranean coast, then through the city of Tarragona, and finally the steady climb skyward before reaching Priorat, which is a high valley, set inside a large caldron, completely surrounded by stunning stone-capped mountains. During the drive we were hit with a torrential rainstorm, which paralyzed traffic and caused a severe accident ahead of us, the slow crawl gave us time to get to know one another, and we really hit it off, our passion for wine and travel revealed themselves. By the time we passed the accident, which was on the north side of the highway, there was a crane set up and it was lifting lengths of steel off the road that had apparently come off the back of an 18-wheeler, which was turned on its side as if it were taking a nap. Quite the spectacle. The poor people who were stuck just behind the accident had clearly been there for a long time, having no way to pass this mess, they were wandering around the highway on foot in small groups, shooting video, or calling ahead on their phones to let people know they would be very late. I secretly hoped some couple would be able to tell their children someday that they met on a highway outside of Barcelona. After we passed the accident and began to move, we saw that the authorities were turning people around to travel south, but still on the north side of the highway. They had cut a lane through the stopped trucks and cars, giving them the option to give up and come back from where they came.

But it was my birthday and damn the torpedoes, I wasn’t going to be deprived of this day, no matter what was thrown at us. When we finally made it to the small village we were heading to, Gratallops (Grah-ta-yopes), in the center of the Priorat bowl, we parked and began wandering up through the small village on foot. I could smell it before I saw it, that unforgettable aroma of crushed wine grapes. We turned the corner off of a small alleyway, and there was a small tractor filling the entire lane, behind it a large bin of grapeless stems that had just been stripped of their precious berries. We pressed ourselves against the wall as the expressionless driver passed us within inches. Out of a small garage door appeared a very tough looking woman, all of maybe five feet tall, but with arms like a weightlifter and a piercing gaze from deep set dark eyes that I could only hold for a second or two before I had to look away. She was wearing tiny shorts, a blue tank top, and had a bandana wrapped around her wine-colored hair. Errant pieces of grapes were stuck to her wine-stained clothes and her skin like the remnants of an exploded head. This was Sylvia Ruiz, of Celler En Numeros Vermells (Numbers in the Red), a tiny winery. I would soon discover that she was a master winemaker.

The visit didn’t start well, as were clearly interrupting harvest and she didn’t look very happy to see us. But after Anthony made the introductions and paid her a compliment by telling her that I was enthusiastic about trying her wines she welcomed us in to her tasting room, which was also her lab, and her office, and her art studio. It was a chaotic mess. There were paper placemats set up on a table that she had hand painted and empty tasting glasses nearby, and after my eyes finished taking in the room, I noticed several very good paintings on the wall that she had done of wine bottles. In the first ten minutes we were there her phone rang twice, she barked orders and hung up. The man who drove the tractor popped his head in the door and asked her some kind of question to which she answered in such a way to indicate, “Yes, you idiot.” She was boss-lady, defined. But Anthony and I were still able to get a couple of questions in that indicated that we weren’t just there to have her pour wines and smile at us and this seemed to change her mood because all of a sudden she told us to follow her.

We passed through a door into a production facility where the bloom of freshly pressed grapes smacked us in the face. There was another man inside grabbling handfuls of pomace, or marc, which are the remains of skins, seeds, and stems having just gone through a basket press. The pressings look like a giant purple cake. I asked Sylvia if it was Garnacha (Grenache) and she smiled and said, “Sí!” She then invited us to dig our hands in, so we all reached into grab a handful of this grape brick, which was really hard to get out, it was so compressed. It smelled like heaven. I snapped a few pics, which she had given me permission to do. I asked what she did with it, and she said that she spreads it in the vineyards as compost.

Then she told us to follow her again and we walked over to a tank. She gave us each a glass and then proceeded to open the spigot and pour us all samples of a cloudy purple liquid. This was last year’s Priorat which had just been moved to this tank to make room for the new wine that was being pressed today. It was delicious, even in such an unfinished form. She said it would be a good vintage, but 2025 was going to be even better. We turned around and there were bins full of sweet, ripe, whole cluster Syrah grapes that we were able to try.

She asked us if we wanted to taste a white wine that was still fermenting, and of course the answer was yes. The cloudy chartreuse liquid was still sweet, the yeast not finished gorging on the sugar just yet. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a terra cotta egg that she had completely painted with flowers. It was full of aging wine. There were barrels of every size stacked randomly everywhere we looked. Large 600 liter barrels and smaller 225 liter barriques, as well as concrete and stainless fermenting tanks. Syliva was clearly an alchemist.

Avoiding angled rakes and snaking hoses, barrels, and splattered buckets, we made our way back to the tasting room to finally taste some of her wines. As she opened bottles, I kept the questions coming. “Was this grown in llicorella, the famous dark slate from the area? Which kind of Garnacha is this, Peluda (hairy leaf) or Negra? How old were the vines? How do you determine the blend?” Sylvia was happy to answer them all. She broke out a 3D map of Priorat and pointed out where various vineyards were located, their elevations, soil types, and how the light moves across the valley. When we finally got her wines in the glass, no surprise, they were outstanding. It would have been such a disappointment after everything if the wines weren’t good, but they were much better than good, they were masterful. I understood why this tiny, but powerful winemaker, who also made wines for several other wineries in the area, looked the way she did. She was an artist. I asked her if she ever slept? She said she sleeps very well, when she actually gets to bed. By the way, she’s the mother of a teenager, too. God bless her.

Anthony took us out into the vineyards after our visit with Sylvia and I was able to pick the grapes from 106-year-old Cariñena (Carignan) wines. The vines themselves were rather scrawny. I was so surprised. I have seen 75-year-old Cabernet Sauvignon vines, and even older Zinfandel vines in California, and the trunks are as thick as my thighs. These scraggly vines looked like they had only been in the ground for a few years. But the fruit was delicious. Just like people, the older they get, the better they are, even if they don’t produce as much as they used to, what they do make is superb. So perhaps 60 is only the beginning.

We had lunch at another winery restaurant called Clos Figeuras, and then we toured the winery of Buil & Giné, a 105-year-old winery, in the afternoon, where again, we were treated to an insider’s tour. By the time we returned to Barcelona, the day had been everything I could have hoped for, the grandest gift to myself.

Here’s where I would normally tell you that you have to visit Barcelona, but it seems like I am the last one to make it there, as my friends and family have made clear. As I mentioned, I really didn’t want to leave when it was time to go home, and I can’t wait to go back. I think next time I will head to the Penedes wine region with Anthony, and we’ll discover the Cava there, those delicious bubbles made from Spanish grapes. In Barcelona, there is still plenty more Gaudí to discover, tapas to gorge on, and wide, tree-lined streets to wander.

Oh, My Gaudi, it’s Barthelona

Let’s read more

Oh, My Gaudi, it’s Barthelona

More interactions with the French

Let’s read more