BELOW THE SURFACE

AT FIRST GLANCE, THE SPANISH TOWN OF ARANDA DE DUERO LOOKS LIKE ANY OTHER. BUT BENEATH IT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS YOU ’LL FIND UNDERGROUND WINERIES SERVING REDS, WHITES AND TEMPTING LOCAL CUISINE

- JESSICA VINCENT

If there’s a trick to eating chuletillas, I haven’t learned it. I toss the sizzling lamb cutlet from one hand to the other, my skin turning pink from the hot fat running down my fingers and onto my palm. Unable to withstand the heat any longer, I let the chop hit my plate and wave my hands in defeat.

“You have to pick up the chuletilla from the two bony ends,” says my guide, Sara Garcia, plucking the meat from a heap of burning vine wood as easily as if she were picking grapes. Before making a second attempt at the cutlet, I look around at the labyrinth of candle-lit stone passageways and brick arches spreading out in every direction around us.

At street level, Aranda de Duero — the capital of the Ribera del Duero wine region, which spans Castile and León’s Burgos, Segovia, Soria and Valladolid provinces — looks much like any other provincial town in northern Spain. Queues form at clay-roofed butchers’ shops selling morcilla (blood sausage) and chorizo; unassuming bakeries display their flattened olive oil bread in the windows like trophies; and chalkboards announce a ‘menú del día’ of garlic soup and salt cod. On the pastel-hued Plaza Mayor, where the air smells of fire-roasted lamb and brewing coffee, grey-haired men sip cortados and families sit around wooden barrels laden with oily sheep’s cheese and cherry red tempranillo.