If this is the first of my posts on the Spanish Wine Tasting that you are seeing, it is the 8th one in a series covering each day of the great wine tasting trip that we did in September/October of this year. The first post is a summary of the entire trip and you can find that at https://billwinetravelfood.com/2022/10/10/two-week-spanish-wine-tasting-trip/ . The posts for each day get into the details of the wines we tasted, the wineries we visited and what we learned there, the hotels we stayed at, the restaurants we ate at, and the historic, architecture, and geographic sites that we visited.
On Saturday we spent the full day in Bilbao, no bus rides 😊! We had a lovely breakfast on their roof top overlooking the Museum and the river. Excellent food and fantastic service. We then had a guided tour of the Guggenheim Museum. After the tour we walked around to the river side of the Museum to Nerua, a Michelin 1 Star restaurant that is in the Museum building but not directly accessible from the Museum. We had a fantastic 10 course tasting menu there with five lovely Spanish wines. After this long, delightful lunch we walked around the outside of the museum taking more pictures, this time in daylight.
It is very hard to give full credit to the Guggenheim Museum in this short post. I’ll try to show how much we liked it in two sentences. The town of Bilbao is not an easy place to get to in Spain and not near any of the other major locations you would want to visit. But it is absolutely worth making the effort to go to Bilbao just to visit the Guggenheim Museum. A number of cities were considered by the Museum Planning Commission, and when they established a shot list of cities, each gave presentations on why they should be selected. Bilbao was chosen. The portions of the building that have the metallic facing on the outside are sculpture wings. Those with white stone walls are art wings. But both art and sculpture are given new meanings in this Museum. The only artists that I really like are the Impressionists like Monet, Picasso, and Van Gough. I have little interest in other schools of art and least interest of all in Modern Art. The art at the Guggenheim does not fall into a specific school, in my opinion, but is probably closest to Modern Art. But I found both the art and the sculpture at the Guggenheim very impressive and truly enjoyable. Below I will try to give a hint of the magic that the Guggenheim presents with three examples and then add a few other pictures. Howard and Antonio had arranged for our group to be split in two and each of us had a guide for about 14 people, so it was very interactive and added greatly to our appreciation of the displays.
If there is one thing that really stands out at the Guggenheim, it is size. These are not statures on a table or pictures in frames hung on the wall.
- The first wing we went in was a sculpture wing and many of the huge sculptures in this wing were focused on motion. There was a maze that we walked through. This picture shows the one sculpture that really stood out for me. When we walked inside it, our sight perspective was altered somehow so we had great difficulty keeping our balance. We had not had any wine yet! The floor was flat but we could not easily walk in a straight line, we had to keep trying to catch our balance. The Guide suggested lightly touching one of the walls while we walked and that immediately restored my balance. If I took my hand off the wall, I again was disoriented. The picture cannot convey how this happens and we were all talking as to how the curved walls made this happen. We were actively part of this sculpture.
- This table display was in one of the Art wings, not Sculpture. It is dynamic art that captures the evolution of technology. It starts on the left with an electric light going on as shown in the first picture. Over about three minutes it moves across the table turning on and off different devices to show how electricity was used in more and more ways. The second picture shows the end of the process. I thought the approach to show creativity and evolution with technology was very interesting.
- When you walk into the huge main lobby of the Museum, over in one corner is a wall of moving red lights. When you walk up to it you see that each pillar is streaming words from different news sources in many different languages. Then you see that you can walk between the different light streams through to a room behind. The reverse side of those streaming red lights is streaming blue lights with just a few repeating messages alternating in Spanish, Basque, and English. To leave you walk back through the lights into the main lobby.
Having a guide gave us background and color on the things we were seeing and helped the three examples above really jump out to me. We could ask her questions which made it much better than the headsets that play recorded messages for most if not all of the things on display like many museums have today. The recorded messages are a giant step over a printed visitor guide, but a live guide who really knows the museum is another giant step better. If you are able to get to the Guggenheim Museum, I strongly suggest you investigate in advance the ability to have a guide take you through the Museum.
Below are pictures of a few of the other exhibits to give you an idea of the size and diversity of what they have on display.
We got to the Nerua restaurant at 2 PM for our luncheon and were there over 3 hours. Here is a picture of the two of us standing in front of the kitchen when we arrived. Our group had a private dining room and our own menu, so I have no idea what the price is for lunch there. The picture shows our menu of the different dishes and wines that we enjoyed. As with our other meals, additional wine was available for the asking. We had three passed hors d’oeuvres to start with, which were all delicious, and a very nice Cava, Spain’s version of Champagne, from the Penedes with them. Then we sat down to 9 courses of plated dishes. We had the next three wines shown with the first 8 courses and the Dulce wine with the Butter Bun ice cream. Beth took pictures of every course, but I am only showing one of them here, the mackerel, as an example. All of them were not only delicious, but they were also plated like works of art. One of our friends we were seated with cannot have gluten and the staff had prepared for her alternatives for any dish that had gluten.
This was the second 1 Star restaurant we went to as part of the tour package. I wrote about the other one in the post for September 20. That first one was in a small country village and was a very small restaurant on the second floor over an inn and the 23 of us took over the entire restaurant for that luncheon. We had a wine tasting on the patio outside the restaurant where they guided us through the wines that would be served with the meal before we went in for lunch. Nerua was very different – a large restaurant in a major city and it was in the same building as the major attraction in that city, the Guggenheim. We had a private dining room but they had the rest of the restaurant open for those with reservations as the same time. So both restaurants were very different in size and atmosphere – country inn, big city premier restaurant. But each had plates where we gasped at the plating as they were presented and every dish at both restaurants was a delight.
After the long, wonderful lunch we took some additional pictures of the outside of the museum, this time in daylight and I have the topiary again to show the size and the colors in daylight. We then walked back across the street to our hotel. We did not need anything more to eat after that incredible meal, but we did go up to the rooftop for a glass of wine later that evening. They had a musician playing the accordion and it was great to sip the wine and look out over the Museum and the river.
We were in this hotel for three nights and it was the midpoint of our trip so we followed our plan and turned our laundry into the hotel since packing enough clothes for 18 days would have meant at least one more suitcase. As you can see in the picture. It was waiting for us in our room in a lovely basket. It was NOT inexpensive but well worth the cost and we really loved everything about this hotel.
Bill's Thoughts on Wine, Travel, and Food 