Blame it on Rioja

Spanish wine expert par excellence Helio San Miguel, the man behind the Cervantes Institute’s vaunted Wines of Spain Seminar Series, last year devoted an entire evening to a vertical tasting of Bodegas Miguel Merino Reservas called ‘Under the Radar,’ beginning with Merino’s first vintage, 1994, explaining in the course handout that “Miguel Merino wines are always the biggest surprise at blind tastings, time after time outperforming the most optimistic expectations and eclipsing much more famous names.”

In Wines of Rioja (Mitchel Beazley, 2004), John Radford writes that Merino’s “self-effacing charm [and] devotion to his bodega…ensure that one day he will be a superstar of Rioja.”

Merino set up his small bodega in the early 1990s on the outskirts of Briones, a quaint hilltop village in the Rioja Alta sub-region, after a career devoted to the business and marketing side of the wine industry. Today, he works nine hectares of his own vineyards (augmenting his harvest with grapes from a few growers nearby) and makes a silky and approachable wine with the impressive structure of a modern-styled Rioja and the admirable and food-friendly finesse of a more classically-styled Rioja. I’ve used his wines in three tastings over the last year and a half; to my taste, Merino’s wines are lovely example of a modern Rioja with a recognizably Riojano taste.

• Tomorrow, Friday, July 20, if you live in the New York area, you can taste for yourself: the East Village’s Tinto Fino, an elegant little shop devoted exclusively to Spanish wines, will be hosting a tasting of Merino’s newly released 2000 Reserva from 6:00p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

For more information: www.tintofino.com

Since my on-air encounter on Friday morning with Caprea, an Italian goat’s milk cheese coated with a thin layer of cracked wheat (which looks an awful lot like toasted coconut), my thoughts keep drifting back to that breakfast reverie.

Max Schrem of Formaggio Essex on the Lower East Side, sold me one on Thursday to bring to an on-air tasting for “Morning Living with Dean Olsher (and Betsy Karetnick),” on Martha Stewert Living Radio, the next day. I brought along some Bee Raw blueberry honey from Maine to the Sirius Satellite Radio’s Midtown studios early the next morning, drizzled some in the center of each of the four plates I was arranging for our assembled group, and instructed everyone to start with the Caprea, first a bite on its own and then a piece dipped into the honey.

Certain flavors you introduce to your mouth are just so spot-on, well, you just know it– and you gotta shout it out. My friend Sasha loves the chicken, goat cheese, and roasted tomato sandwich at Frank on 2nd Avenue in the East Village, and the last time the sandwich came up in conversation, she belted out a high-octave C. I can’t sing that high, but would have if I could have for the Caprea and blueberry honey combo.

Made in Campania from the unpasteurized milk of goats browsing the hillside pastures and woodlands of Italy’s largest natural park preserve, Caprea is the ultimate breakfast cheese: mildish, citrusy, and toasty (from the grain); clean but not at all bland; a rustic and cheesecakey vehicle for a wide range of honey and fruit preserves.

Pairings

Honey: Bee Raw American Single Varietal Honey, especially blueberry, wild raspberry, and star thistle.

Preserves: Ardèche Cerises-Groseilles (black cherry-red currant). Organic small-batch, hand-made preserves from La Ferme de Mazairas in the French department of Ardèche (Rhône-Alpes); another Formaggio-Essex find; and quite possibly the best preserves I have ever had in my life.

Wine: Every so often, white wine for breakfast is a decadent, roundly satisfying treat. If you are prepared to stand down the stares of your loved ones, then I would recommend cracking an early morning bottle of 2005 ‘Plácet‘ Rioja Blanco from Bodegas Palacios Remondo in Rioja Baja. It’s 100% Viura, rich, lemon-balmy, modern-styled, farmed organically, partially barrel-fermented, delicious.

(Photograph courtesy Formaggio Kitchen)

Woke up this morning after seven glorious days in the Blue Ridge Mountains, slogged my way through the dense city heat, pointlessly slapped the side of a cab on the corner of First Avenue and 3rd Street as the taxista was executing one of those wide-angle, dodge-the-pedestrian-and-still-make-the-turn kinda turns (the ones you applaud when you’re a passenger in a big-ass hurry but make you furious when you’re the hapless dodgee), bought a paper to soothe my nerves, ordered a double skim latte at the Bean, and found this hilarious article on the front page of the New York Times.

“New York Wineries Face Tastings Gone Wild,” the header shouted. I was hooked, taxista transgressions instantly forgotten.

God bless Corey Kilgannon, for writing the kind of prose that, if written 100 years ago, would surely have sent Luc Sante’s note-taking fingers all aflutter as he was preparing for Low Life: lurid tales of “intoxicated visitors who have tossed back full glasses of wine without regard to nose or body,” or that “inebriated group at the Palmer Vineyards…who hopped off a hayride and began gallivanting naked through the vines,” and (holy bar crawl!), those dastardly “bachelorette parties that often culminate in tabletop dances, to the horror of nearby oenophiles sniffing or sipping the local chardonnays.”

“Real wine people,” Pat Pugliese of the Pugliese Vineyards is quoted as saying, “avoid weekends [on the North Fork].”

What?!

What’s a “real wine person”? I thought I was a real wine person, and I had a blast on the North Fork on a Saturday not so long ago.

If wineries/industries/national wine entities want to lure people of a certain late-alphabet generation (read: future consumers) into cultivating a life-long love of a given product/lifestyle, can we really expect everyone in that group to jettison deeply ingrained cultural rituals simply because they interfere with the exalted experience of a clearly classist notion of what constitutes a “real wine” person?

I think not.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I like my coffee ground fresh, and I am convinced that there is a very short (15 to 18 minute) window between the perfect cup and that nasty, bitter cup I wouldn’t feed to the rats on 3rd street. I guess that makes me a little snobbish. But, you see, people my age (mid 30s or thereabouts), we’ve all got our thing, the song or dish or belief the compromise over which we simply and unapologetically cannot abide.

To this I add: I too get riled up when folks drinking nearby don’t act nice or respectful or down a 3oz. taste of wine like a lemon drop shooter (this I have done, but never in front of the sober representative of a winery). It drives me nuts sometimes. But what’s the alternative? A private club? An exclusive admission fee?

Not sure. The Times article mentions a local paper, the Long Island Wine Press, printing wine tasting etiquette guidelines, with “rules of proper behavior.” A good idea, except that most contemporaries I can think of would probably find more comedy in this sort of thing than a code to drink by. It’s a start. But let’s face it: we live in a cocktail nation. If that is to change, we cannot cling to old ways and slap the wrists of those who show up with the wrong tie.

To the exhibitionists of Palmer Vineyards: I salute you.

Scenes from the North Fork, April 21, 2007: (above) Bedell Cellars Tasting Room, Cutchogue, NY; (below) Pellegrini Vineyards Tasting Room, New Suffolk, NY.

If white wine in Spain is known as vino blanco, why is red wine called vino tinto (tinted wine or colored wine) instead of vino rojo?

According to María José López de Heredia, managing director of the Bodegas R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia, the answer is tax evasion.

“Many years ago,” she explained to me last spring, “Taxes for white wines were much higher than they were for reds, because white wine was more popular back then, for its diarrhetic properties and perceived health benefits.

“So, when the tax man would come around to make an assessment in order to collect taxes, bar owners would add a colorant to their white wines in order to avoid a higher tax.”

Now, I haven’t substantiated this claim with any historical research, but given that María José is the great-granddaughter of Rafael López de Heredia, who founded the winery in 1881, I figure she’s about as reliable a source on the matter as any you could find.

At a time when the notion of a wine bar has evolved into a sleek, all too often sterile formula, it’s refreshing to encounter a place like Casa Montes, a semi dive in the colorful Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid owned and operated by the charming and slightly cantankeroous 66-year-old César Montes.

Casa Montes is on the southern end of the neighborhood’s main sqaure, and the line separating bar overflow from plaza layabouts gets a little blurred on balmy evenings. Despite extensive gentrification in recent years, Lavapiés maintains a palpable bohemian edge, and its streets at night are filled with a melting pot of students, artists, immigrants, drug dealers, hardened working-class outdoor drinkers, and quasi-revolutionaries.

Inside, bottles of wine line rows of shelves running the entire length of the back wall, each with César’s handwritten evaluation, often in verse, affixed to it. It’s sort of like the descriptions you see poked into different varieties of cheese in a typical American cheese shop, although I have yet to see a cheese description written in iambic pentameter.

The stainless steel bar itself runs parallel to that same wall, effectively creating a contiguous buffer between proprietor and patron except for a 3′ by 4′ opening below the bar, through which patrons occasionally crouch in order to gain entry to a tiny alcove behind the bar, evidently an office/storage room where, rumor had it, a bathroom could be found.

The top of the bar, strewn with crumpled napkins and half empty bottles of wine, supports a five-spout beer tap and a long glass case filled with cheese, cured meats, and other, less readily identifiable (and decidedly less appetizing) fruits of the butcher’s toil.

The all-Spanish selection is broad and varied, with countless labels not available in the U.S., and overall, the quality is high.

Just don’t ask for white wine. César is a member of the ‘we drink only red wine in these parts’ school of thought, the old school of Old Castile, if you will.

Go ahead and order beer if you’d like. But if you’re a guy, just make sure you don’t ever order a clara, equal parts draft beer and a sweet, clear, Sprite-like soda called gaseosa, widely viewed in much of Spain as a ‘girl’s drink.’ I witnessed one guy doing just that, and César took great pleasure in disdainfully calling the hapless fellow’s masculinity into question, without blinking an eye.

David Moreno takes justifiable pride in the success of his bodega in Badarán, a small village in La Rioja Alta not far from the storied monasteries at Yuso and Suso. When I met him last year, he told me that 14,000 visitors had come through the doors of his Bordelais chateaux-inspired winery in 2005, that transactions at the bodega itself account for a considerable portion of his total sales, and that “we never close.” Demand for his Wine Club–in which members purchase wine by the barrel and pay regular visits to the vaulted underground cellar to enjoy their wine with friends and family amid its soul-soothing calm and flattering light–has never been higher. Moreno exudes the quietly triumphant air of someone who has created something quite lovely from scratch, and that’s pretty much what happened.

He makes a typically broad spectrum of wines, from Blanco Joven to High Expression (called Vobiscum), and I was quite taken by his 2002 Seleccion de la Familia Crianza, aged in a combination of French and American oak, so much so that I took a bottle home with me, since his wine does not yet have American representation.

But the highlight of our afternoon visit came at the end. Fond of working alone late at night, Moreno’s daughter Gemma told us during lunch, David passes the time singing local folk tunes called jotas, a song form that falls somewhere between medieval English ballads and early-19th-century German song cycles a la Schumann and Schubert.

After a little gentle coaxing on our part, Moreno agreed to sing for us. For twenty minutes or so, no one said a word, and the only sound in the cavernous underground space was Moreno’s earnest and unwavering baritone, creating in short order an unforgettable experience bordering on the magical.

(Photo courtesy Jose Guerra)