Sanlucar de Barrameda
The city lies in Andalusia, right at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. It is a place known for popular tourists resorts.
After the discovery of America when all ships passed it to reach Seville Sanlucar de Barrameda flourished.
Magellan sailed from Sanlucar in 1519 and Columbus Sailed from Sanlucar in 1498.
What to do in Sanlucar
I recommend a visit to Sanlucar de Barrameda in month August when they have the annual horse races in town. Horse races take place the fourth and the second weekends of the month, it lasts totally eight days. If you want to go to the Coto Donana wetlands park you must head up the coast to the mouth of the Guadalquivir river. Then you arrive to town Sanlucar de Barrameda.
Sanlucar is a small fishing village and exact leaving point of Magellans's and Columbus voyages and adventures of discovery. You can hire a nice series of rooms in one half of the Sanlucar estate. There you can select between interesting estates of the eccentric duchess of Medina Sidonia, who's Hotels contains a gorgeous 20 luxury rooms and suites all covered in medieval original furniture. Those suites look out onto in the Venetian style interior courtyard garden.
Horse race in Sanlucar
From Playa Bajo de Guia over the river to the Parque Nacional de Donaan you can catch the ferry. On that place the pilgrims crossed the river with their horses this was at the end of the tree-lined Calzada del Ejercito, it was a huge spectacle in that time.
As i mentioned beffore Sanlucar de Berrameda is very popular for its horse racing. Horse racing is known in town since 1845. It takes place on a long stretch beach of the mouth of the Rio Guadalquivir.
Races are in summertime in month of August, on the 4th and on the 2nd weekends of the month, daily from 6.00 pm, from Thursday to Saturday.
Grapes, vine, sherry
Sherry is made of three sorts of grapes: palomino, pedro ximenez (PX) and mocatel. Palomino is the most boring sort of grapes in the world. But in the Lake and surroudings palomino is ripening a little bit different. They save keep him in a wooden barrels, which they dont fill up to the top.
Solera is a very important procedure by ripening of the sherry. Its like this. We have three barrels. In lower one is the oldest and in upper one is the youngest wine. They filled the bottles with one third of contents of the lower barrel.
The missing part in the bottle they fill up with a next barrel and so on up to the highest barrel in which we have the most fresh wine. With that procedure they achieve uniformity and homogeneity. Sherry wines we have in all kind of varietys, we can separate them its by colour and level of sugar.
Sherry an unusual wine
Sherry is probably one of the most unusual vines in the world. His home is in Spanish town Jerez de la Frontera, which lies on south of the country. French people call them xeres and English ones sherry. In any case Sherry is well known world spread name for that vine, even it is not clearly sure who was the first person who named that vine.
In XII. Century started merchandise exchange between Spain and England, where Spains where exchanging their vine from Jerez for English wool. In England vine from Jerez become soon very popular which meant considerable source of wealth for Castilia a small christian country on the Iberian peninsula. The popularity of the wine spreaded very quickly among the French people, Fleming people and also with discovering of America in the »New world«.
Spanish people were spending a lot of time for protecting the name Sherry (1967), which originaly came from the word Sherish, or as the Arabic people named the town of Jerez de la Frontera. Today is possible to find vines with sign of American and Californian sherry.