[Jan Morris drinks her way across Europe]















[The Surreal Gourmet: Throw a salmon on the barbie]






















BY JAN MORRIS | contemplating the inconclusive condition of Europe, snarled up as it is in matters of convergence, common currencies and fishing quotas, I resolved to expose myself to some classic European certainties. And what could be more classic or more certain than life in the legendary wine-lands of the continent, where people have been making great wines for generations and life revolves around the seasons, the climate, history and the earth itself?


So I drove away on a lovely morning of early summer and made for the vineyards across the Channel, promising myself one marvelous bottle of wine wherever I went, to see how the wines lived up to the settings.


First I went to Haro, in Spain.  I bought a bottle of a 1990 red Reserva, from the Abeica bodega at the nearby village of Albeca, which was recommended to me as an exceptional example of modern Rioja. I am drinking it now at a table outside the Cafe Madrid, in the main square of the town, with a large plate of miscellaneous tapas.


This is classic Europe all right!  Haro stands in archetypal Spanish countryside: bare mountains, vine-sprinkled hillsides, castles, village churches like cathedrals, hilltop hermitages, cuckoos and crickets and solitary elderly men hoeing fields.  Euzkadi -- Basqueland -- is a few miles away.  The pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela passes nearby.  And nobody could ask much more of Spanishness than the Plaza de la Paz in Haro, which is built on a gentle slope around a florid bandstand, and has all the requisite lampposts, pigeons, clocks, cobbles, arcades, benches with old men asleep on them and mostly inoperative fountains.  On a rooftop above my head a pair of storks is nesting.


Everyone seems to know everyone else in the Plaza de la Paz.  Everyone knows the two ancient ladies who walk up and down, up and down, past the cafe tables beneath a shared white parasol.  Everyone greets the extremely genteel seller of lottery tickets, and time and again the cry of Hombre! rings across the square as stocky jarreños (jug-makers, as they call Haro citizens) greet one another around the bandstand.  Every passer-by peers into the convivial interior of the Café Madrid, to see what friends are propping up the bar, and a few look curiously at me as I pour more wine from the bottle I have put under the table, to keep it out of the sun.


I must not idealize the scene.  A group of suave Spaniards (from Burgos, they tell me) has just settled at a pair of tables on the pavement, very gold-bangled and silk-scarfed and sunglassed, and a terrific pair of thugs whom I take to be Basque terrorists has just swaggered by with an alarming dog.  There are a few weirdos about, bikers in leather jackets, babies in ostentatious prams.  But in general the passers-by seem people without pose or affectation, a rough but serene kind of people, from a rough but generally serene place.


And the wine?  Give me a moment, while I swallow this prawn and think about it.  Mmm.  More serenity than roughness, I think.  It is example No. 1,301 of a remarkable vintage of 8,400 bottles that won important prizes in Bordeaux last year, but it is loyal Rioja all the same, well-oaked, honest, strong, straight, an organic tasting wine.  And as is only proper in the new Spain -- in the new Europe -- its winemaker was a woman.






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