THE “QUEBRANTAHUESOS” (The Beard Vultures)

By Pablo Goicolea Ruigomez

pablogoicolea@gmail.com

During my military service in Spain back in the 80’s, I was, so to say, “lucky” to be destined to the High Mountain Skiers corpse in Rioseta, near the Candanchú ski resort in the Pyrenees.

I remember clearly the moments when we were standing still in formation, with frostbite in our ears waiting for the morning review. No one dared to move, but I would somehow manage to glimpse to the sky to distract myself from the fact that it was freezing, always keeping my head looking front. Most of the times I looked, I would see a silhouette flying near el Pico Del Águila – a peak nearby, elegant as I had never seen before. Day after day, the same scene, it came out despite the snow, the stray wind currents, the storms, defying all the elements. It looked like an eagle but it flew like a vulture. I could not quite figure out what it was, so when I had the chance, I did a little research in a Bird’s book. This bird has an unmistakeable diamond-like tail with slim wings like a golden eagle.

It was the Quebrantahuesos, literally translated the “Bonebreaker”, technically the Gyapetus Barbatus, and the Beard Vulture in English. It was a rare species of Vulture that almost led to extinction in Europe, where there are only a few couples left, spread around the Pyrenees. Luckily, in the past years the population has been recovering, and some couples have been introduced in the Alps, in Picos de Europa and in Sierra Nevada, where they were already extinct.

Its name comes from its unusual diet. It feeds almost exclusively of bones from other dead animals. It is the only bird which does this, it occupies the last place in the food chain, and it only eats when all the other scavengers have finished. This is why, while most of the vultures have bold head and long necks, this one has feathered head, a short neck with a distinctive feather which looks like a beard and a mask over its eyes.

The Quebrantahuesos can swallow whole bones up to 20cm, but when bones are bigger, it uses a curious mechanism to break them in smaller pieces. It grabs the bones with its peak and starts flying high up in the sky, it looks for a big rock and, when it finds it, it lets the bones fall with the marksmanship of an archer and they break when they make contact with the rock.

I hope I have woke up your curiosity enough so that when we are in the Pyrenees, you can’t help but look up to the sky to see if you are the lucky one who find this amazing bird. If you do see it, please stop and contemplate its magnificence, it is worth the while.

A brief history of Time

By Jack Clarke

jack.james.clarke@gmail.com

Fellow Lions, I did not need to think hard about my topic. Marshalls, my employer, are a supplier of natural stone and hence I see rocks everywhere. I researched the history of the rocks we will walk on and hope you find the below of some interest.

The geology of the Iberian Peninsula consists of the rock formations on the Iberian Peninsula, which includes Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and Gibraltar. To the west, the peninsula is delimited by the continental boundary formed by the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. A collision of tectonic plates led to the formation of a new mantle. Iberia, which occupied the center of Pangea, the only terrestrial continent at the time, received a new suit made from 310 geologic and 290 million years due to the movement of tectonic plates. It modified the external and internal geology of the peninsula, when the movements gave rise to the destruction of the mantle that existed until that time, between 30 kilometers and 150 kilometers deep, and the formation of a new one today.

The Pyrenees form part of the huge alpine geological system. This 430 kilometre long, roughly east-west striking, intracontinental mountain chain divides France, Spain and Andorra. It has an extended, multi-cycle geological evolution dating back to the Pre Cambrian. The chain's present configuration is due to the collision between the microcontinent Iberia and the southwestern promontory of the European Plate (i.e. Southern France). The two continents were approaching each other since the onset of the Upper Cretaceous about 100 million years ago, and were consequently colliding 55 to 25 million years ago. After its uplift, the chain experienced intense erosion. A cross-section through the chain shows an asymmetric flower-like structure with steeper dips on the French side and more rolling formations on the Spanish side.

The Pyrenees stretch in a westnorthwest-eastsoutheast-direction over 430 km from the Bay of Biscay in the west to the Golf de Lyon and the Golf de Roses in the east, their width across strike varying between 65 and 150 km. They are bounded in the north by the North Pyrenees front, a major thrust fault along which units from the North Pyrenees have been transported over the southernmost part of the Aquitaine Basin their most northern reach. Their southern limit is the South Pyrenees fault. Here, thrust slices from the Sierras Marginales and their lateral equivalents are displaced southward. Yet in a larger, geologically more meaningful sense the Pyrenees continue farther west into the Basque and the Basque-Cantabrian chain. They finally disappear along the continental margin of Asturias. Likewise in the east, they do not just vanish in the Mediterranean, but rather pursue their course via the nappe units of the Corbières into low Languedoc and even into southern Provence. At their far eastern end in Provence, typical pyrenean fold trends are superimposed by alpine structures to be finally cut off by the arc of the western Alps.

The pyrenean chain in the larger sense is nearly a 1,000 km long.

The Death Zone

By Bernardo Felix

ber_enrique@hotmail.com

The ‘death zone’ is known in the mountaineering community as the altitude above sea level where the quantity of oxygen in the air we breathe is lower than the minimum that the human body cells require to live. Therefore, above that altitude the human body would start deteriorating and in some unfortunate cases this can lead to death.

This happens at altitudes above 8,000 meters and there are only 14 mountains above that level. There are two strategies to deal with the death zone, if you are trying to summit of these mountains. The first is to use artificial oxygen, it is simple, the lack of oxygen is replaced with bottled oxygen through your stay into the death zone. This strategy is widely used in the Himalayas and Karakorum, especially for the commercial expeditions. This method does not remove the technical difficulty of that particular mountain or the physical and mental endeavor that is required to get to the summit, but certainly makes it more easy, and some believe it to be a form of cheating.

For those who do not what to take with them bottled oxygen to the mountain, the strategy is to make their stay in the death zone as short as possible. For that a high altitude camp would be installed in the death zone threshold area. Physical and mental preparation are extremely important, as well as a very good acclimatization, as, without it, the stay in the death zone could last only minutes before developing high altitude sickness. Then you would wait for a window of good weather and try to assault the summit and get back to the high camp within 12 hours or less, if possible, sometimes it can take longer, but for sure you would avoid spending a night in the death zone.

The Pyrenees are not so high and dealing with lack of oxygen in the air will not be a problem. However, even at 3,400 meters people can develop altitude sickness, if the body does not acclimatize properly to sudden changes in altitude and pressure. For that reason, we will be progressively gaining altitude from our first day at Barcelona, and then moving to the base camp at El Poblado, etc. Keeping our bodies hydrated will always help and being fit for purpose, as well.

I am looking forward to my first trip to the Pyrenees and hope to meet the Lions team very soon.

Weather Forecast May 2017

Wine Tasting for Beginners

By Alexander.Turcan@Turcanlaw.md

Learning to taste wine is no different than learning to really appreciate music or art in that the pleasure you receive is proportionate to the effort you make.

The ability to sniff out and untangle the subtle threads that weave into complex wine aromas is essential for tasting. Try holding your nose while you swallow a mouthful of wine; you will find that most of the flavor is muted. Your nose is the key to your palate. Once you learn how to give wine a good sniff,  you’ll begin to develop the ability to isolate flavors—to notice the way they unfold and interact—and, to some degree, assign language to describe them.

Whenever you have a glass of wine in your hand, make it a habit to take a minute to stop all conversation, shut out all distraction and focus your attention on the wine’s appearance, scents, flavors and finish.

Step 1: Look

How to judge the look of a wine color and opacity of wine can give you hints as to the approximate age, the potential grape varieties, the amount of acidity, alcohol, sugar and even the potential climate (warm vs. cool) where the wine was grown.

Age: As white wines age they tend to change color towards more yellow and brown colors, increasing in overall pigment. Red wines tend to lose color, becoming more transparent as time goes on.

Alcohol and Sugar: Wine legs can tell us if the wine has high or low alcohol and/or high or low sugar.

The thicker and more viscous the legs, likely the more alcohol or residual sugar the wine has.

Step 2: Smell

How to judge the smell of wine aromas in wine nearly give away everything about a wine; from grape variety, whether or not the wine was oak-aged, where the wine is from and how old the wine is. A trained nose and palate can pick all these details out.

Wine aromas fall into 3 categories:

Primary Aromas: Primary aromas are from the type of the grape and the climate where it grows.

Secondary Aromas: Secondary aromas come from the fermentation process (the yeast). A great example of this is the “sourdough” smell that you can find in Brut Champagne that is sometimes described as “bready” or “yeasty.” Yeast aromas can also smell like old beer or cheese rind. Another common secondary aroma would be the yogurt or sour cream aroma that comes from fermentation.

Tertiary Aromas: Tertiary aromas (sometimes referred to as “bouquets”) come from aging wine. Aging aromas come from oxidation, aging in oak and/or aging in bottle over a period of time. The most common example of this is the “vanilla” aroma associated with wines aged in oak. Other more subtle examples of tertiary aromas are nutty flavors found in aged vintage Champagne. Often, tertiary aromas will modify primary aromas, with the fresh fruit of a youthful wine changing to be more dried and concentrated as it develops.

Step 3: Taste

When tasting, pay attention to:

 Sweetness

 Acidity

 Tannin

 Alcohol

 Body

Sweetness:

The best way to sense sweetness is on the front of your tongue in the first moment you taste a wine.

Wines range from 0 grams per liter residual sugar (g/l RS) to about 220 g/l RS. By the way, 220 will have a consistency close to syrup!

Most people would draw line for dry wines at around 10 g/l of residual sugar, but the human threshold of perception is only 4 g/l.

Most Brut Champagne will have around 6-9 g/l RS.

Your average harmoniously sweet German Riesling has about 30 or 40 g/l.

Wines with high acidity taste less sweet than wines with low acidity, because we generally perceive the relationship between sweetness and acidity, not the individual parts. Coke has 120 g/l but tastes relatively “dry” because of how much acidity it has! Coke’s really high acid is why you can also melt teeth and hair in it. Coke’s total acidity is way higher than any wine.

Acidity:

Acidity plays a major role in the overall profile of a wine, because its the mouth-watering factor a wine has, which drives wine’s refreshment.

There are many types of acids in wine, but the overall acidity in wine is often measured in pH. Acidity is how sour a wine tastes. High acid wines are often described as “tart” or “zippy”. pH in wine ranges from 2.6 which is punishingly acidic to about 4.9 which is barely detectable as tart, because it’s much closer to the neutral 7.0 measurement.

Most wines range between 3 and 4 pH.

High acidity wines are more tart and mouth-watering. High acidity can indicate a wine from a cooler climate region or wine grapes that were picked early.

Low acidity wines tend to taste smoother and creamier, with less mouth-watering qualities.

Super low acidity wines will taste flat or flabby.

Tannin:

Tannin is a red wine characteristic and it can tell us the type of grape, if the wine was aged in oak and how long the wine could age. You perceive tannin only on your palate and only with red wines; it’s that cotton-ball- like drying sensation.

Tannin comes from 2 places: the skins and seeds of grapes or oak aging. Every grape variety has a different inherent level of tannin, depending on it’s individual character. For example, Pinot Noir has inherently low-level of tannin, whereas Cabernet has very high level.

Tannin from grape skins and seeds is typically more abrasive and can taste more green.

Tannin from oak will often taste more smooth and round. It typically hits your palate in the center of your tongue.

Tasting for oak tannin versus grape tannin is extremely difficult; don’t worry if you don’t get it right.

Alcohol:

Alcohol can sometimes tell us the intensity of a wine and the ripeness of the grapes that went into making the wine.

Alcohol level can add quite a bit of body and texture to wine.

Alcohol ranges from 5% alcohol by volume (ABV) – 16% ABV.

A sub-11% ABV table wine usually means something with a little natural sweetness.

Dry wines at 13.5% to 16% ABV are all going to be quite rich and intensely flavored.

Fortified wines are 17-21% ABV.

Alcohol level directly correlated to the sweetness of the grapes prior to fermenting the wine. For this reason, lower ABV (Sub-11%) wines will often have natural sweetness; their grape sugar wasn’t all turned into booze.

Warmer growing regions produce riper grapes which have the potential to make higher alcohol wines.

Body:

Body can give us clues to the type of wine, the region it was grown and the possible use of oak aging.

Body usually is directly related to alcohol, but think of body as how the wine “rests” on your palate.

When you swish it around in your mouth, does it feel like skim, 2%, or whole milk? That texture will roughly correspond with, light, medium, and full bodied in wine. Usually body will also correspond with alcohol, but various other processes like fermentation, oak aging or residual sugar can all give to wine additional body and texture.

Six major flower aromas in wine

Learning the major flower aromas will help you discover all the awesome nuances in wine.

Flower aromas in wine are actually from a variety of chemical compounds. For instance, the smell of geranium flowers in wine is the presence of geraniol, a terpenoid. Many wine experts talk about esters, terpenes and thiols.

Rose

A complex flower aroma in wine, rose can be found in a variety of red and white wines.

Examples: Gewürztraminer, Pinot Noir, Grenache, Sangiovese, Nebbiolo

Geranium

Considered a fault when present in high amounts because the chemical compound geraniol doesn’t occur naturally in grape must (mashed grapes before fermentation).

Examples: Muscat, Gewürztraminer, Malbec, Torrontes

Citrus Blossom

A perfumed smell that is very complex and desirable in white wines.

Examples: Riesling, Chardonnay

White Flowers (Lilly)

A subtle flowery smell that accompanies fruit flavors in white wines.

Examples: Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Muscadet

Lavender

A flower aroma found in mostly red wines, similar to rose.

Examples: Syrah, Malbec, Tempranillo, Sangiovese

Violet

The floral aroma found in fine red wines.

Examples: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petite Sirah, Malbec