Sell a bottle of Gran Reserva Rioja before its fifth birthday and the region will fine you. Rioja is a wine denomination in northern Spain, strung along the Ebro across some 65,000 hectares of La Rioja, Basque Álava and a corner of Navarra, overwhelmingly red, overwhelmingly Tempranillo, and built around a legal promise that somebody already did the aging for you. It became Spain's first Denominación de Origen in 1925.

In this episode, Marti Buckley explains how phylloxera in France sent Bordeaux merchants south in the 1860s carrying small barrels and long aging, why traditional Rioja tastes how it does, what crianza, reserva and gran reserva guarantee by law, and how a wave of growers pushing single-vineyard and village wines is rewriting a hundred-year-old system that has only ever measured time in oak.

If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at travelcookeat.com

Not every pastry has its own aviation policy. The ensaimada is a coiled Mallorcan spiral, its pork lard dough stretched nearly transparent, baked and buried under powdered sugar, and the Balearic government once calculated that around forty of them fly out on every plane bound for the mainland. The earliest written record sits in a Palma convent ledger from 1642, though both leading theories about who first coiled one point to bakers whose religion prohibited pork, a contradiction that runs through the expulsions and forced conversions of the 1490s. Marti Buckley traces that origin debate, explains the European protection now governing the name, names the three Palma bakeries worth the walk, weighs the filled-versus-plain argument, and lays out how a two-euro breakfast pastry forced Ryanair into a public retreat.

If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at www.travelcookeat.com

Spain won the 2026 World Cup while conceding just one goal across the entire tournament, a first for any champion, with a squad that included (for the first time ever) zero Real Madrid players. So let's talk fútbol! Football. Soccer. In Spain, it's big. In this episode, Spain Explained talks about the machinery behind that win: the canteras, literally quarries, where clubs like Barcelona and Athletic train children from age seven, the web of more than 21,000 registered clubs and town-hall leagues that feeds them, and the fútbol sala courts credited with forging Spanish ball control.

Learn about the 100,000 dues-paying members that own Barcelona outright. Or why Athletic Club has fielded only Basque players for over a century without ever being relegated. And how a league with no playoff stays tense until the final matchday. Plus the rituals around the game: four daily print sports newspapers, radio marathons on air since 1954, and la quiniela at the tobacco shop.

If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at travelcookeat.com