20 September 2015 / leggypeggy

A wine shop in Barcelona

Australia, Barcelona, Belgium, cookbooks, cooking, Draguignan, festivals, Flayosc, markets, seafood, sparking water, villages, water, wine

Josep is rightly proud of his wine shop. He sells spirits too.

This week we’re enjoying village life in the south of France. Yesterday we went to Draguignan (yes, I can pronounce it), where we bought up big at the weekend market, visited the traditional arts museum, climbed to the panoramic viewpoint (puff, puff) and enjoyed lunch. Then we were back in the evening for a nail-biting handball game between Draguignan and some unknown competitor. Draguigan lost. 😦

Today we’ll gather along the narrow main road of Flayosc for the 2nd annual billy-cart/go-kart races and local festival. Then it’s off to another nearby village for their festival and a wine tasting.

I’ll write about all those later in the week, but the mere mention of wine tasting reminded me of our visit last week to a wine shop in Barcelona Spain.

We drove to Spain to spend a couple of days with Aurélie and Marti. We’ve known Aurélie since the year 2000, when her younger brother, Jean-Mi, stayed with us for about six months while he was on exchange from Belgium.

There’s a wonderful connection between our two families and we’ve caught up in Australia and Europe many times over the last 15 years. So the trip to Spain was a special treat for us to catch up with Aurélie and welcome Martí to the ‘extended’ Bright family.

Before we came to Spain, Aurélie let us know that Martí loves to cook (which puts him top of the chart in my book), and especially loves to cook seafood. We brought him one of Rick Stein’s seafood cookbooks (stay tuned for its page-32 recipe to appear on my cooking blog).

But this night he had another recipe in mind. So while Martí went to buy groceries, the rest of us went to their local wine shop—Mestres—to buy supplies. Aurélie has high praise for this little shop and I have to agree that they’ve done a fine job stocking it and the service is good too.

Aurélie told Josep, the owner, that we were from Australia—a fine wine-producing country—and asked him to choose a dry white and dry red that were fairly priced and good examples of Spanish wine.

He did a great job and also suggested a slightly salty mineral water. All three came to less than A$25, and were perfect with the delicious seafood salad Marti made using bonito, cannellini beans, tomatoes, capsicums, red onion and a dressing. I missed getting a photo, but I did manage to get details for the wine shop. It’s at Tenor Massini 28, telephone 93 339 71 26. I don’t know that I could find it without Aurélie to guide me.

News flash and update: We had such a wonderful time chatting, cooking, eating and sampling wine, that I never got around to taking a picture of Aurélie and Martí together. Luckily, Aurélie sent me a great one today from their recent travels in Portugal. I’ve added it below.