Spain! (part 4)

Welcome to day four. This is going to be a long post, so I'll apologize in advance. Many of these pictures are intended for the other participants of the First Light class, so I'll forgive you if you don't spend too much time looking at those. That reminds me, if any of you are interested in learning more about travel/journalistic photography, I can't stress enough the excellence of these First Light Workshops. If you have any interest, you should definitely check them out.

Back to the photography! On this day we took a bus up to the wine country (like the Sonoma valley, but in Spain) and we split into three groups at three different wineries. At this moment I can't remember the name of the one we were at, but as soon as one of my photofriends (tm) emails me to remind me what it was, I'll put it on here... also, I can't remember the name of the lovely woman who showed us around the place, but more about her later.

There weren't many people working the day we came, the weather was crappy so they sent everyone home early since picking grapes in the rain is no fun at all. Here is one of the die hard workers that were left, cleaning up the juice vats. Mmmm, vats of juice...

Most of what they make here is Cava, the Spanish equivalent of Champagne. If you're familiar with Frexinet sparkling wine, then you've had Cava. It's from this same region near Barcelona.

Look at that totally Hawt! photo action of Jay Kinghorn shooting our guide explaining sedimentation in wine bottles. I show this photo to demonstrate his awesome technique, and because my photo of same scene is no good. By the way, Jay is a great workflow teacher and a master Photoshop/Lightroom dude. Check out his web page if you need someone to help you figure out what to do with all your photos... also if you're interested in learning how to better use your computer for photo work...

This is a rack of muscato, a sweet dessert wine. We had some after dinner, it's tasty.

Although it might look like it from this picture, no radiation is used in the production of this wine. We were given a full tour of all their cellars. Lots and lots of wine, but not much light. Gots to be creative with the flash.

Why is this thermometer in Fahrenheit? I know it wasn't 75 Celcius. Maybe it's a humid-o-meter, I'm not sure, but I like this picture.

This was our guide for the tour, she also happens to be the wine maker. She's a pro! She told us all about how the bottles are filled, about the corks, about cleaning the bottles... all that kind of stuff. She was unbelievably kind to us and spent over an hour walking us around and showing us her craft. Once I find out her name and where she works, I'll make sure she gets these pictures.

Corks!

Grapes!

Mi Padre!

Now we're moving on to the Mas Ferrer winery where we had a tapas party and drank a lot of Cava. We all piled back into the bus and made our way to this little hole in the proverbial wall.

Since the wine cellars at the winery from earlier in the day were less than photogenic, it was lucky that we got some time to take pictures in the Mas Ferrer cellars. They were beautiful and old. I hear a rumor circulating around that these were build as bomb shelters, and were converted to hold the wine. Whatever they were for, they're pretty awesome now.

Oooh, a wine ghost!

That's a lotta caps.

This is Albert. He owns this here place and was a great host to us. Cheers to you Albert!

The rest of the pictures here are of participants for the most part, so I'm going to leave it here for now, but some other time, when I'm not getting up at 4 am to catch a flight home, I'll add names to these faces.