The Rioja Coast
In last Sunday’s New York Times, restaurant critic Frank Bruni wrote a feature on the Tuscan coast of Italy that made me think of the coast of País Vasco in northern Spain, particularly the fishing village of Guetaria and the gastronomic mecca of San Sebastián.
Rioja, the wine region, includes swaths of vineyard land that spills outside of La Rioja, the autonomous community, into Navarra and País Vasco, an inter-regional wine identity whose influence spreads beyond it delimited DOCa borders, particularly into the aforementioned coastal areas where gastronomy is treated with the reverence of a religion and red wine cannot ripen.
When Bruni writes,
You want splendid dinners? They’re about as easy to find on the Tuscan coast as anywhere else in Italy, and if your passion is fish, you’re in particular luck. Not just in Porto Santo Stefano but every place we visited, restaurant menus brimmed with it,
he could very well be talking about the Basque coast of Spain, where fresh fish meets mountain bounty (vegetables, meats, cheese) meets an insanely high culinary standard meets a deep respect for Spanish wine, Rioja chief among them.
The town of Guetaria, with its two famous restaurants El Kano and Kaia, offers great wine lists and arguably the freshest fish in all of Europe, and has in just a few years gone from a great side trip to a must-visit.
And all of that just a little over 100km from the town of Haro, more or less the same distance between Viareggio and the vineyards of Chianti Classsico.
Of course, a Basque would likely balk at the description of his coastal treasures as an extension of a largely non-Basque inland zone, but no matter. If the lower Hudson valley is becoming the vegetable basket of New York City, then the Ebro valley has long been the coastal Basque Country’s grape basket.
PHOTOS: TOP, Jamón Ibérico and Rioja Rosado at a pintxos bar in San Sebastián; BOTTOM, the wine list at Rekondo in San Sebastián.
June 13th, 2009 at 9:49 am
You make me want to hop on a plane…