At this time I woke as much as Mike’s 7:30 alarm understanding full effectively neither of us had been going to stand up till 8:30. After a short time I made a decision to do a 4 mile out and again from our lodge in Plaça d’Espanya over to the Olympic park. After going up a decently sized hill, I ran previous stunning views of town, canine walkers, and previous athletic fields for rugby, cricket, soccer, tennis, in addition to an enormous monitor. I acquired again in time for a fast bathe and breakfast on the lodge.
At 10:00 we headed out for a bus tour of town. An area Barcelona information named Anna joined us to inform us in regards to the historical past of the realm Afterwards we acquired out and walked the streets previous La Pedrera and Casa Battlo, attending to see it on foot. A number of the cool buildings we handed on the bus journey together with sculptures and parks had been constructed for the 1929 World’s Truthful and for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
After some photos of those locations, we headed to lunch. On the restaurant we had some scrumptious tapas after which fish for the entree. I’ve actually gotten to love one tapa with the tomato sauce and olive oil on grilled bread and one other one with fried eggplant discs. I additionally tried mussels for the primary time which had been surprisingly good regardless of the looks and odor.
Once we completed our meals, we headed over to the house of Freixenet Cava, the place we acquired a tour of the wine cellars and realized the method of how the glowing wines had been made and the event of the method through the years. From what I can bear in mind, the cava begins with 3+ kinds of top-quality grapes (for various kinds of cava) which are grown on this area. The various kinds of grapes are finest grown at sure altitudes within the area, and the soil helps largely within the improvement of the standard of grapes, with the quantity of clay serving to include the rainwater. They talked about that they don’t irrigate the fields and simply let nature do its work. They decide the grapes within the later summer season months, though attributable to international warming and growing temperatures, the instances for harvest have been untimely, with the final 2 years being the earliest on document.
The following step within the cava making course of is to crush the grapes (now industrially) in giant containers the place the primary massive squeeze produced 60% of the “grape juice.” That is the top-quality stuff they use for wine making, with the aromas and flavors they’re searching for. The following squeeze will get many of the remainder of it, which isn’t nearly as good high quality, so that they promote it to distilleries and different corporations for making alcohol and different drinks. The following step is including sugar and their very own yeast to the massive containers and letting it sit for some time to ferment.
To make glowing wine nonetheless, they put the liquid within the bottles, and let it sit once more for some variety of months to let the yeast do its factor permitting no air to flee. The yeast will ultimately gather and clump collectively, creating “lees” (a sediment) which must be taken out earlier than they will promote the bottles. They’ve a shaking/shifting/rotating course of to separate it out from the liquid preserving it on the finish close to the lid of the bottle whereas the liquid is within the backside. They’ve an automatic course of now performed by machines that may do 100 bottles in solely 3 hours per machine when it was once a number of days or even weeks for two bottles performed by hand.
The a part of the bottle with the lees are then suspended in ice water till it freezes after which (additionally automated now and fewer tedious than by hand) the bottle is opened, and the lees are eliminated, then it’s recapped with out shedding any of the cava. Additionally, the wine was beforehand saved underground as a result of it has a relentless temperature required for optimum fermentation, which is about 50-55 levels Fahrenheit.
They make a number of million bottles a yr and had been the primary glowing wine to promote internationally. Freixenet is an enormous provider to the the US as effectively, and I assume it’s well-liked. After the tour we acquired to style two of their hottest Cavas. I’m not a fan of alcohol so I didn’t significantly prefer it, however studying the method was fascinating.
Within the night we headed over to the Olympic stadium for the Champions League fixture between FC Barcelona and runners up within the French Ligue 1 final yr, Brest. Lamine Yamal was out with an damage, however early within the match Lewandowski, the Barca striker (#9) transformed a penalty to make it 1-0 early. Barca went on within the second half to attain two extra by means of Dani Olmo and one other from Lewandowski. It was an excellent end result for Barca general and an excellent spectacle, however I used to be additionally in a little bit of a dampened temper after I noticed that my workforce Manchester Metropolis, who had been enjoying on the similar time, had blown their 3-0 halftime lead and tied Dutch facet Feyenoord 3-3, bringing the Metropolis winless streak to six (however technically breaking a 5 recreation shedding streak).
I additionally loved seeing everybody sporting Barca merch on the match. Ramy wore his fortunate Lewandowski shirt, and Daniel had a easy all black Barca hat and a twin scarf commemorating the day. General it was a really enjoyable day and I to see my very first UCL recreation, which was one thing I will not neglect!