The Wine Museum, Ojen, A Bit Of What You Fancy
There are municipal museums, ethnological museums, fashion museums and archaeological museums and then there is, probably unique, the Wine Museum at Ojen. Of course there are other wine museums but none are quite like the one at Ojen. You would expect, and not be disappointed, to see wine making apparatus dating back a couple of hundred years, labels from bottles long consumed naming vineyards that are now a fond memory and a gift shop, but at Ojen the normal is just window dressing.
The managers of the museum, Antonio and Luis, both of whom speak English, have developed the museum into a wine merchants. Nor is this a common or garden wine merchants. The tastes of hundreds of regular patrons of all nationalities are noted and Antonio and Luis then seek out wines that will suit their clientele. Not the wines you see on supermarket shelves, although there are one or two of those, hidden away as if in disgrace. Rather wines from vineyards that may only produce a thousand bottles, wines from unusual places like the Corral de Castro, Vino de la Tierra Contraviesa - Alpujarra, from Bodega Los Barrancos, at 1,400 metres the highest vineyard in Spain, and wines that are themselves unusual like the luscious Moscatel Naranja that incorporates orange peel to give a real flavour of Andalucia. Although any Spanish wine is considered for inclusion in their range, most of all they concentrate on the wines from Malaga region. Speaking to Antonio and Luis you gain the impression that they look on their clients as members of a fairly exclusive club who are privileged to taste the wines they find.
So, where does that leave the stranger who wanders into the place? As a future possible member of the club, that's where. It is a little like 'Open All Hours' with Antonio playing the part of Ronnie Barker determined not to let you leave without a purchase. You rapidly appreciate that Antonio knows his wines and it is his spiel that sells the wine, or is it his eagerness to open a bottle for you to sample with him? Either way it is not a hard sell.
After, or with a glass, Antonio is only too pleased to tell you the extraordinary tale of Ojen's Eau-de-Vie, an aniseed liquor that became famous all over the world. In 1840 Pedro Morales started distilling it in stills heated with juniper wood, a secret recipe that consisted of aromatic herbs and grapes from Ojen. It soon became fashionable to ask for a 'media copeta de Ojen' in any bar in Spain. Of course there were imitators but Ojen was the name of the liquor so always appeared above and in larger letters than the place of origin, which rather tickles the locals when they see the label Ojen Madrid. Even Picasso felt moved to immortalise a bottle of Ojen anisette in his work Bodegon Espanol. At the height of its fame the recipe was lost. After being handed down from father to eldest son for four generations, one father died suddenly before he had the chance to pass the recipe on, the secret died with him.
Back to the wines and now we look at the local Malaga wines from five areas, Bodegas Quitapenas in the Malaga area, dating back to just after the phylloxera in the 1880's it is the oldest wine producer, to Serrenia de Ronda, a group of growers pioneered by Prince Alfonso de Hohenlohe who only started to produce wine in the last few years, via Bodega Tierras de Molino established in 1977, Bodegas Almijara and Ucopaxa from the Axarquia area who have been growing the Moscatel de Alexandria grape for 40 years, and wines from the Bodegas Gomara at Campanillas, established in 1963 and now a worldwide exporter. For many years Malaga wine was synonymous with a sweet, cloying white wine that can still be bought 'tourist wrapped' in a raffia cradle. The new bodegas are producing something very different, from subtle, fruity, dry whites to full bodied reds that equal or even excel a good Burgundy. And they are all there for you to try or buy.