The Education of Pablo
Score!
I came home yesterday to learn that my brother and roommate, Pablo-who turns 27 today-had chosen a bottle of Rioja the night before based on vintage recommendations I made in my post, “All You Really Need to Know About Wine.”
Applied learning at its most gratifying, albeit on a modest scale.
Two of Pablo’s closest friends from high school were in town from D.C., and the trio headed across town late Tuesday night, downing Bourbon and Ginger Ales at Employees Only, a West Village bar close to my own heart, before ending up at The Little Owl, a restaurant co-owned by another of Pablo’s Hayfield High School fellow alums, Gabriel Stulman.
Gabriel gave the boys a tour, including a visit to the restaurant’s underground cellar, where he instructed Pablo to pick out a bottle for them to drink from any of the 250-odd selections. Remembering that I had advised readers to snag a ‘94 or ‘95 Gran Reserva when they see one, Pablo quickly settled on a 1995 Gran Reserva 904, one of the flagship wines of La Rioja Alta, situated in the railroad station district in the town of Haro.
La Rioja Alta’s wines are among region’s finest expressions of the traditional style, which is to say, wines with long barrel aging in enormous American oak tinas (in the case of the 904 Gran Reserva, four years in barrel and another three in bottle before release), colored brick-red as opposed to purple, with restrained fruit and something akin to the way your hands smell after sliding into third base.
“Man, it was really good,” Pablo told me the next morning, showing me a picture of the bottle on his cellphone.
What did it taste like, I asked him.
“A little like honey,” he replied, “Delicate, sweet, balanced, light, perfect.”
La Rioja Alta 1995 Gran Reserva 904 is available in New York City at Chambers Street Wines, Morrell & Company, Union Square Wines, and Appellation Wine and Spirits. It retails for about $50. For availability in your area, click on www.wine-searcher.com.