Hungry Travelers - Page 11 of 82 - Bringing the tastes of travel back home

Knotty Vines: overachieving everyday wines

Posted on July 9, 2022July 7, 2022 by Pat and David

Courtesy Rodney Strong Wines If ‶Knotty Vines″ sounds familiar, you might be a fan of old-vine Zinfandel from Rodney Strong Wines. A zin pioneer, the Sonoma producer created the name for its wines made from its oldest vines. The company has now resurrected the name as an umbrella for a new line of modestly priced wines aimed squarely at millennials. Moreover, they've put the company's resident millennial winemaker, Olivia Wright (at right), in charge of making them. Wright explained that Knotty Vines was conceived to be an approachable and affordable entry point for new wine consumers. ‶It's a challenge for the whole industry,″ she said. ‶So I talk to family and friends about what they like. The word I hear a lot is 'smooth,' which...Read More

Cake celebrates a signature taste of Valencia

Posted on July 2, 2022June 25, 2022 by Pat and David

The whole idea of a Valencian orange is confusing. The area around Valencia boasts a staggering number of orange orchards. Most of the trees bear sweet oranges, but not what is called a Valencia orange in the U.S. That would be a creation of William Wolfskill, an agronomist who hybridized the juice orange in the mid-19th century. He called it Valencia because the oranges of that part of Spain were famously sweet. Of course, they were sweet. They were what we now call mandarin oranges. And most of the citrus varieties grown in Valencia today are mandarins or one of the many mandarin-pomelo crosses. Orange remains one of the signature flavors of Valencian cuisine. Fresh oranges appear throughout the meal from an orange-onion salad to...Read More

La Mostra PROAVA explores Valencian wines

Posted on June 25, 2022June 25, 2022 by Pat and David

When we asked at the Valencia regional tourism office about wine touring, one staff member suggested that if we waited a week, we didn't need to go to the wines. They would come to us. La Mostra PROAVA (the PROAVA exposition) was scheduled at the Turia linear park. Created in 1993 with the help of the regional government, PROAVA is a cheerleader for artisanal wine and food from the region's three provinces: Valencia, Castellón, and Alicante. The 32nd Mostra offered more than 150 wines along with loads of beer, cheese, sausages, pates, oils, marmalades, and regional sweets. Dutifully, we bought our €10 tickets online, scouted out the park to see where the gates would be, and arranged to be near the front of the line...Read More

Noodling around with fideuà in Gandía

Posted on June 18, 2022June 16, 2022 by Pat and David

While we were living in Valencia, we took advantage of the cercanías (essentially the regional commuter rail) to explore beyond the metropolis. One Costa Blanca city on our bucket list (and on the train line) was Gandía. The big attraction is the ducal palace of the Borja family, who rose to fame (or infamy) when they changed the spelling to Borgia and took over the papacy. The Palau Ducal (Carrer del Duc Alfons el Vell, 1, Gandía; +34 962 871 465; palauducal.com) is a sprawling Gothic fortified palace complex where Sant Francesc de Borja was born in 1510. He later became one of the most important figures in the history of the Society of Jesus. Thanks to the stewardship of the Jesuits, the building is...Read More

Valencia loves its tiger nut ‘milk’ with fartons

Posted on June 11, 2022June 7, 2022 by Pat and David

Valencia is famous for more than its rice dishes. Locals have been making a milky drink from the tiny tubers of Cyperus esculentus since the 13th century. Deeply chilled, it's the perfect refreshment on a warm day. The tubers are often tiger nuts because they're striped and have a hard shell. In Spanish, they're chufa and properly speaking, the vegan milk made from them is horchata de chufa. No one in Valencia bothers with such distinctions. The drink is horchata or orxata, pronounced the same despite the difference between Castellano and Valenciano spellings. The center of chufa cultivation is Alboraya, a marshy section of Valencia that was once its own town. You can buy tiger nuts on the street or in any public market, but...Read More

Summer’s ‘la vie en rose’ begins by Public Garden

Posted on June 7, 2022June 7, 2022 by Pat and David

The summer solstice may be a few weeks away, but balmy temperatures, bright sun, and unusually vigorous rose blooms have us thinking summer already. Our penchant for white wines fits the summer well, but we also tend to keep a bottle or two of rosé in the vegetable drawer. Pink wine is the perfect foil for summer food. Sommelier Andrew Thompson of Bistro du Midi (272 Boylston Street, Boston; 617-279-8000; bistrodumidi.com) agrees. In fact, the French bistro overlooking the Public Garden is going all out with rosés this summer in a reprise of the popular Tour de Rosé promotion. Two wines are featured each month along with some signature menu items from executive chef/partner Robert Sisca. For June, it's the Grenache/Cinsault Château Sainte-Marguerite from the...Read More

Modern times at the Mercado Colón

Posted on June 3, 2022June 3, 2022 by Pat and David

Valencia may not have the sheer number of buildings in the Modernisme style as Barcelona, but it does boast its own regional wrinkle of Art Nouveau. Valencianos reserved their most flamboyant structures of modernismo valenciano for the essentials of daily life. That includes the main post office, the train station, and two of the city markets. Had the city not built a neoclassical bullring a few decades earlier, the Plaza de Toros probably would have been Art Nouveau too. We've already written extensively about the Mercado Central, but the even more refined example of modernismo valenciano is Francisco Mora Berenguer's Mercado Colón. Mora studied under Domènech i Montaner, arguably second only to Gaudí among Barcelona's Modernisme architects. The Valenciano architect drew on some of the...Read More

Sants Joan’s embodies Valencian market food

Posted on May 28, 2022May 28, 2022 by Pat and David

Living next door to Valencia's Mercat Central for a month, we often skipped going out to eat. That's not self-pity. We liked cooking fresh market produce at home. There was a real advantage to that, since we never made up a menu until we found out what was available. The same doesn't always work for restaurants unless they go entirely with a chalkboard plate of fare. Many of the restaurants around the market supplement a printed menu with an occasional special based on what's in season. But then a place across the square from the market on the ancient steps to the Lonja caught our eyes. Taberna Sants Joan's (c/Pere Compte, 5, Valencia; +34 963 913 134; facebook.com/Santsjoans) proudly proclaimed that all their ingredients came...Read More

Agua de Valencia, born in the Café Madrid

Posted on May 8, 2022May 8, 2022 by Pat and David

Few cocktail names trip off the tongue with the lyric trill of Agua de Valencia. It even sounds sweet and clear. Purportedly invented at the Café Madrid in 1959 by bartender Constante Gil, it is so popular with tourists to Valencia that bottles labeled as Agua de Valencia are available everywhere from the Mercat Central to most souvenir shops. Look around the tables on Plaça de Mare de Deu behind the cathedral, and at least half sport a tall glass of the orange drink. And why not? Authentic Agua de Valencia relies on freshly squeezed juice from locally grown sweet oranges. (They are not ‶Valencia″ oranges, which were bred in California and named for the city.) Groves of sweet oranges surround Valencia. All grocery stores...Read More

Wine tourism the hard way: Requena by train

Posted on April 28, 2022April 28, 2022 by Pat and David

The ease of wine touring in the United States has spoiled us. Wine tourism in the Valencia region requires more planning. The wineries are largely rural and unreachable by public transit, and visits and tastings are usually by reservation. Most serious oenophiles book a tour of several bodegas and lunch with one of a handful of companies in Valencia. We decided to do it on our own. Reasoning that the most important district was D.O. Utiel-Requena and that Requena had the most wineries, we headed there on the C3 local train. That's the old city plaza at the top of this post. Requena is about 40 miles inland, but the trip takes nearly two hours. The train backtracks on one spur and negotiates some slow...Read More