Many spots in Jerez are not open on Sunday, but they were. We did a tour and tasting. The tour felt…read morea bit artificial, like if you went to Disneyland version of Spain instead of real Spain. The facility is very large -- the tour kept going and going. It was neat to see it. It started with a short motorized "train" ride which was mostly unnecessary and gimmicky. The tour was almost full, maybe 40 people. Then we had a tour guide walk us through various buildings and explain various things about the sherry-making process. She was not a very good tour guide -- she made mistakes / corrected herself and her English was so-so. If you can afford this large facility, fancy videos, etc you can afford better tour guides. Near the end was a video that was kind of cheesy, but used multiple projection screens in a very cool way. Then we did a tasting of five sherries; they were all pretty good. Overall, the tour at Cayetano del Pino nearby was more authentic, friendly, small-group, and informative.

We took our tour bus for about 23 minutes from our cruise ship docked at the port of Cadiz to the…read moreBodegas Gonzalez Byass winery. As you can see from my many pics and videos we toured lots of large, medium and small barrels of wine stored in different locations including above and below ground. Then we had a sit down wine tasting of port and sherry wines. I felt the port and sherry wines were too sweet for me, but might be nice after dinner as a dessert wine. I prefer dry wines like a good Chiati. After our wine tasting we shopped in their retail store to purchase some wine and souvenirs. Our tour bus took us back to our cruise ship at the port of Cadiz. More to come regarding our next port of call in Lisbon, Portugal.

This place has history, but not quality. Out of the three sherry bodegas we visited in Jerez…read more(Fundador, Diez Merito, and Lustau), this one was the worst. The tour itself was not bad... it was very informative, and nice to see the two bodegas (including the oldest one in Jerez), although you can get the same type of experience and information at the other bodegas. The disappointing part here is the tasting. Not only is the quality low, but you also get much fewer tastings and less variety than offered at other sherry bodegas (we tried 5 at Diez Merito and 11 at Lustau!) The tour here includes only 3 tastings of their cheapest and most commonly-available offerings: a fino, a cream sherry, and a brandy. This is a real disappointment; I was more interested in amontillado and oloroso (since I like them), and was curious to try Pedro Ximenez since I had never tried one. It's also not a very wise business move for them, because if they had poured some of those other (better) options, people like me might end up buying some bottles! (but it ended up being very fortunate that I didn't, because I bought those things from other bodegas that had much higher quality and, in the case of Diez Merito, better prices, as well.)