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The next day Jess and Niko cooked a delicious breakfast from the beautiful assortment of things we got at the market and we headed out for Siurana.

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Siurana is about a 15 minute drive up a tiny road from Cornudella de Montsant. The scenery is stunning with cliff bands on all sides as the road winds up the canyons. Red rocks that could be Moab with interesting sculptural elements, streaks of limestone from white to black to pink, olive groves and wineries dot the terraced fields below created a very picturesque and scenic drive up to the top of the hill where the beautiful Siurana sits. An old medieval town, known as the last bastion of the Moors before the Christians retook Spain. Legend holds that the Moorish Queen, Abdelazaia, decided to jump off the cliff in her white stallion rather than fall into the hands of her enemies. The old buildings were stunning, the view from the top stretched for miles — hundreds of feet off every side was a bit unnerving as it felt like a gust of wind could sweep you off your feet and over the edge at any moment.

As far as climbing in Siurana — we hiked down a path close to the parking lot up top, about 15-20 minutes later we were climbing on a beautiful south-facing slab wall with a view of the valley and river below. I think we were in Marges Upper [more to come on routes we climbed here]…

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After climbing for a couple of hours we arranged to do a wine tasting at Celler Ronadelles, the winery/restaurant at the bottom of the hill from Cornudella de Montsant. Not expecting much except to taste a few of their local wines, we were greeted by Albert, a young filmmaker and local wine expert who was a fantastic host and guide. We first got to try some local hooch called Aperitu that had some cherry wine and vermouth. Sweet start with a nice dry finish. Very tasty and a perfect appetizer. Then he took us to the vineyards about a mile away, to show us some really old vineyards, mostly garnache grapes. Most of these fields have been producing delicious wine for centuries. We then visited two of the local cellars where they still store and let the wine ferment right in the middle of Cornudella. The tasting was interesting and informative. 25 euros each seemed expensive at first but a nearly three hour educational tour and the opportunity to taste award-winning wines from the Giral Reserve and Grand Reserve was worth it — mostly because I wanted to see if I could actually tell the difference between our favorite bota box nighthawk red blend and some fancy wine… the experience was really interesting because I usually just kind of sip my wine without paying attention to how it changes as it interacts with the air, time, food, environment. Fancy swirling and sniffing aside, Jess and I just bought another box of red wine for our “everyday” sipping but I think now when we go to restaurants and someone pours that taster wine in front of one of us we’ll have a bit more knowledge and confidence to swirl, sniff, and check out the legs 😉

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