Blame it on Rioja

LIVING THE DREAM: Gabriella Opaz (left) and Ryan Opaz of Catavino

When I’m not busy envying them their chosen career paths, I’m invariably and almost daily drawn to their wine blog/web compendium of all things Iberian and vinous, www.catavino.net. If you’ve ever done even the slightest bit of online research on Spanish or Portuguese wines, you’ve doubtless encountered them too (and maybe even also wished you had their life).

I’m of course talking about husband-and-wife team Gabriella and Ryan Opaz (pictured above, copitas at the ready), who, according to the bio on their website, left the U.S. for Spain sight-unseen in 2004 with a few thousand dollars in their back pockets and, presumably, a high tolerance for uncertainty. Gabriella taught English while Ryan “scoured the streets for work in the wine trade,” launching Catavino in 2005 initially merely to “record his frustrations.” Today, Catavino is the most comprehensive, informative, and tech-savvy online resource for Spanish wine in English, with 10,000 unique visitors per month.

This week the duo is on a whirlwind tour of Rioja and they’ve already started posting Rioja-related material on their site, including a guest post on Rioja from Australian wine blogger Dave Worthington of Tinto y Blanco, a terrific writer with a punchy, readable style and a way with tasting notes. And just today, a post on winemaker reactions to the notion of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ Rioja. I found the response given by Julio Sáenz of Bodegas La Rioja Alta insightful enough to excerpt here:

Gabriella contacted me last month to tell me that they were planning a trip to Rioja and to discuss ways she thought we might collaborate. I am vicariously along for the ride. Which reminds me, one of those collaborations was my own guest post on Catavino due tonight, so I’d better wrap this up.

Catavino will be be sending out a newsletter stuffed with information about their travels and the bodegas they visited in the coming weeks. Click here to sign up for it.

Potatoes have become something of a theme for me this past week.

Whip(ped) Lash
Working my weekly maitre d’/sommelier shift at Chanterelle on the first day of a menu last Monday, I had a spoonful of David Waltuck’s Olive Oil Mashed Potatoes (bound with olive oil instead of butter, flavored with roasted garlic), a key component to David’s crispy-skin New Zealand Snapper with Bouilabaisse Broth. I just happened to be in the kitchen when David placed a saucepan of that hedonistic stuff on the hot slide just after a big pick up.

The degree to which my head tilts back in pleasure on my way to the dishwasher station to drop off my spoon in the silver soak is usually an accurate measure of how much I’ve just enjoyed something, and I am pretty sure an outsider looking into the kitchen at that moment would have been convinced that I was engaged in some kind of limbo lunge under an unseen pole.

Potato Lover’s Month at Gourmet
On Thursday, I opened my weekly newsletter from the revamped Gourmet.com to discover that February, according to Gourmet Editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl, is officially “Potato Lover’s Month,” an occasion she celebrates with links to four potato-based recipes and another to “Heirlooms-to-Be,” a recent blog post by Cristy Harrison on Gourmet’s new interactive website (very impressive, by the way, if you haven’t checked it out yet) about two promising new potato hybrids created in the last five years by scientists at Cornell University, the Adirondack Blue and the Adirondack Red, bred specifically for taste and performance in the kitchen.

For Cornell potato breeder Walter De Jong, Ms. Harrison writes, “culinary quality trumps other agricultural factors like yield and pest-resistance. What’s more, Cornell researchers have worked with culinary students at the CIA and elsewhere to test the Reds and Blues in various dishes, and ‘we are using chefs’ feedback to develop even better future varieties,’ says De Jong.”

Potato Apotheosis: A Match for the Ages
Potato Interlude 2008 reached its high point on Tuesday night, however, on the beautiful and blustery evening my friend, fellow close Dylan listener, and Chanterelle line-cook Charles Imbelli (he made an appearance on BIOR once before, in a post on a fishing trip we took late last summer) and I met uptown for an evening of uniform deliciousness at Thomas Keller’s per se restaurant in the Time Warner building on Columbus Circle.

All twelve courses were so good, so consistent, such little marvels of harmonic flavor concentration and uncompromising product sourcing and technical execution, it seems a little unfair to single out one dish, but the cheese course, combined with the wine I chose for the meat and cheese courses, La Rioja Alta Viña Ardanza 2000 Rioja Reserva, just so completely knocked me out at a point in the evening when I didn’t think anything else could knock me out, that it merits special consideration.

The cheese course was Pyrenées Ossau Vielle (an aged, very buttery, and slightly ‘lamby’ sheep milk cheese from the western Pyrenées of France) served with Twice Cooked Red Bliss Potato and Applewood Smoked Bacon Vinaigrette. I am still thinking about it longingly a week later. The texture and intensity of the cheese, the way its fattiness just seamlessly melded with the creamy potato mash inside the shell of the Red Bliss’s skin, and the way everything came together under the heady flavor spell of that awesome bacon vinaigrette, it was just…wow. A sip of the Viña Ardanza, earthy, tart, wintery in its own right, measured in its fruit, and we had on our hands a match for the ages.

After a moment of silent reverie, and a grateful-to-the-universe look outside the window toward Central Park, I turned to see what Charles thought.

“Man,” he said, “I wish I could wake up to that every morning.”

That makes two of us.

Much like Cataluña and the Basque provinces, La Rioja harbors an ardent passion for wild mushrooms. Foraging for, identifying, and cooking wild mushrooms just hits all the right notes: specialized knowledge and a chance to geek out on it; close physical connection to the earth and a heightened sense of its seasons; a measure of risk that demands vigilance and precision; and ultimately, complex flavors that excite both sense and intellect and call out for wines equally as complex. As mushrooming cultures go, in my experience only Emilia-Romagna, the food-obsessed north-central Italian region I happened to traverse at the height of Porcini season in 2005, comes close to matching Rioja’s mycophilic ardor.

In my last post, I described a sauce made by Francis Paniego from a locally-sourced spring wild mushroom called perrechico (Tricholoma Georgil). Well, there’s a lot more to the story than that.

El Portal de Echuarren, Paniego’s Michelin-starred restaurant, sits high in the Sierra de la Demanda, a mountain range that marks the western frontier of La Rioja, in a town called Ezcaray. Just down the road from Ezcaray, elevation 813 meters, is Rioja’s most important ski resort, Valdezcaray.

Francis is the fifth generation to cook at his family’s roadside inn. His mother’s restaurant, called simply, Echuarren, is next door. Famoulsy, they share a kitchen. Despite innovations he brings to his kitchen, tradition and fierce pride in local abundance run deep.

“There are many modern techniques here,” he told me last year. “But we use them only if they add value to our things, to our land. It is a little concept that sets our cuisine apart.”

And what a bounty that land yields in spring and fall, when rain, temperature, humidity, and decaying organic matter yield more than 500 varieties of mushroom, many of them edible, a few quite exquisite. So abundant are Ezcaray’s surrounding hills with wild mushrooms that each year, on the first weekend of November, the town plays host to Jornadas Micológicas, a festival devoted exclusively to the celebration of wild mushroms. The most adventurous celebrants convene on the town’s main square early in the morning of day one and break off into small groups, for forays into the countryside. Later in the day, professional mycologists help foragers classify what they’ve brought back in.

All weekend, the dozen or so of the town’s restaurants, bars, and taverns create special mushroom menus; tables set up along the main square display hundreds of varieties found locally, all arranged alphabetically using scientific nomenclature; another square feature fanciful mushroom “habitats”; a third is devoted entirely to an interactive mushroom playground for kids.

For more information, see www.amigosdeezcaray.com

Photos courtesy Francis Paniego.

Francis Paniego (top) at El Portal de Echuarren, Ezcaray, Spain, October 2005 (Photo: Daniel Hertzell); María José López de Heredia (bottom) at Bodegas R. López de Heredia, Haro, Spain, October 2005 (Photo: Eric Striffler.

If ever a moment illustrated the harmonious coexistence of tradition and modernity in Rioja, a phenomenon applicable to all of Spain really, it was my dinner at Francis Paniego’s El Portal de Echuarren with Bodegas R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia managing director María José López de Heredia, while on a press trip to the region in May 2006.

Apart from finding Ms. López de Heredia exceedingly charming and passionate–and grappling, I must admit, with a profound sense of delirious incredulity that I should find myself in such exalted company–I was just mesmerized by how well her bodega’s wines went with Francis Paniego’s food.

Which is significant because here we were in Rioja’s ski vacation town of Ezcaray enjoying the food of the region’s most talented and celebrated practitioners of Spain’s cutting-edge Nueva Cocina, all the while drinking wines from a bodega that’s become an icon for classic winemaking in Spain.

Our whites that evening included the 1995 Viña Gravonia Blanco Reserva (100% Viura, aged for four years in American oak), the 1988 Viña Tondonia Blanco Reserva (15% Malvasia*, six years in oak), and the 1981 Viña Tondonia Blanco Gran Reserva (10 to 15% Malvasia, up to eight years in oak and another fifteen before release!).

The aromas of the ‘81 Tondonia Gran Reserva were heady and seductive, unlike anything being produced right now in Rioja–”honey, bitter almond, coconut, (petrol?), something tropical,” I wrote in my notes. The wine’s acidity was very much alive, a Grand Cru Chablis-like foil to the evening’s third course: a metallic, Belon-like oyster (I forgot to ask for the name) served with grilled melon and quash puree, and drizzled with almond cream.

But it was with the fourth course that the ‘81 Tondonia really showed it brilliance as a food wine: spears of white asparagus with a perrechico cream drizzled with extra virgin olive oil. Perrechico, Maria Jose told me, was a seta de la temporada, or a seasonal wild mushroom, found in the surrounding hills from April to June.**

So, why 1968?

Well, fast forward a year and half: now working on behalf of the region, accompanying the author and wine columnist Elin McCoy, I had dinner with María José in Ezcaray once again, this time at Echuarren, the traditional restaurant next door to El Portal, operated by Francis’ mother, Marisa Sanchez. At one point, María José pulled out a bottle of 1968 Viña Bosconia Tinto Gran Reserva and told us that this was a special vintage for her, since this was the year she was born.***

She also told us that one of Spain’s glossy magazines had recently run a feature called the “Generation of 1968,” centered on Felipe, Prince of Asturias, the only son of King Juan Carlos I and heir to the Spanish throne, who was also born in 1968. Among the famous Spanish 68-ers also included in that feature: María José López de Heredia and Francis Paniego.

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NOTES:

*According to Ms. López de Heredia, Malvasia is also known as Rojal, from the Spanish word for red, because it oxidizes easily.
**Last September, while meandering through a one of San Sebastian’s main squares, Amy and I stumbled upon a series of bookstalls, and by chance came across a beautiful little book called Las Setas Comestibles by Andres Buesas (Vitoria: Caja Provincial de Ahorros de Alava,1967). When I got back to the U.S., I looked up perrechico, and there its was: Tricholoma Georgil, a variety found in northern Spain, known variously as muserones (Cataluña), seta de piedra (Castilla), and setas de orduña. For the record, the variety did not appear in either of my North American wild mushroom field guides.
*** Also the birth year of my brother Patrick, not to mention also that of Manuel Camblor, who commiserates with other members of the turning-forty-this-year-if-I-haven’t already crowd in the ‘comments’ section below.