Blame it on Rioja

Breakfast today, courtesy of LESP. Photo: ADM

One of the more glorious advantages of living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan is my proximity to Russ & Daughters. The Harry Winston of smoked fish, a downtown New York landmark, and a living history of classic Jewish-American gastronomy, Russ & Daughters today is owned and operated by third-generation Mark Russ Federman, alongside members of the family’s fourth generation, including his daughter, Nikki Russ Federman.

Every so often, when I need a physical and/or emotional boost, I walk down to their Houston Street shop, take a number, and breathe it all in, settling my excited nerves until it’s my turn to order.

My go-to sandwich used to be smoked sturgeon and caviar cream cheese on an ‘everything’ bagel, an idea inspired by a dinner special created back in the late 1990s by one-time Picholine chef de cuisine and now Esca chef/co-owner Dave Pasternack (grilled sturgeon fillet with a caviar butter sauce), but lately I’ve been mixing it up a bit.

Just two weeks ago, I ordered a slight variation: slices of smoked sturgeon and Wild Western NOVA (a lightly smoked wild Pacific salmon) on an everything bagel, with horseradish cream cheese, sliced red onion, and sliced tomato ($12.95). As my counter guy was preparing this decadent gem of a breakfast, one of his colleagues who happened to have witnessed the structure being built turned to me and said,

“Aha! The king of sandwiches.”

Whether or not she’d seen it before mattered little to me; her comment made me feel like a king for having ordered it. As for eating it, well, let’s just say noises of delight were made.

Rioja pairing: El Coto Rioja Rosado 2007. Available for purchase online at www.winechateau.com ($11.29/750ml bottle)

I guess Dr. Vino and I are not the only ones with outdoor summer drinking on the brain. I woke up this morning to find an article in the New York Times about just that, called, summerily enough, “Ah, the Heat, the Crowd, the Park, and the Booze.”

“New York City is somewhat of a drinker’s paradise year round,” reporter Cara Buckley writes on the first page of the Metro section, “but a certain extra layer of permissiveness seems to infuse the city in the summertime, along with a wellspring of opportunities to get sloshed, slightly or mightily.”

Although I don’t remember seeing the following paragraph in the print version of the article this morning, a parenthetical disclaimer of sorts touches on the legality question we discussed yesterday:

“The official line from the city’s parks department is that alcohol cannot be brought into city parks, though in the summer of 2003, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg suggested that drinking wine at concerts in Central Park was O.K. At Bryant Park on July 7, a security guard said he turned a blind eye to booze on movie nights, ’so long as it is covered, like in a bag.’”

I remember a Swiss friend of mine in Spain making fun of having seen gainfully employed Americans carrying open bottles of wine in brown paper bags at outdoor events to elude the authorities, “like the hobos you see in the old movies, ahahaha…”

Laugh all you wish, Hans. Tonight, as I settle in to watch Bamako at the Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema Series in Queens, and pop open a paper-shrouded bottle of 2001 Sierra Cantabria Gran Reserva whilst digging into a plate of lamb tagine cooked up by the folks at Mundo Cafe in Astoria, the summer sun setting over the East River and a nearly full moon on the rise behind me, I’ll drink a toast to you, my good man, wherever you are.

One of these days I will use the word “summer” as a verb, and at the end of that sentence will be someplace–Shelter Island, the Catskills, Andalucia–that conjures up lazy afternoons and high-end seasonal foodstuffs, but until that day comes, I make it a point to compile a list of cool outdoor summer activities that take place in the city, which is where I’ll be summering this year.

Two of the season’s best outdoor events involve film and food, are both just a stone’s throw from the East River, and began last week: Socrates Sculpture Park’s Wednesday night Outdoor Cinema Series and The Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy’s Thursday night Movies with a View,a few miles downriver.

Each summer Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, teams up with curators from the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, and a handful of local restaurants and musicians or DJs, to create internationally flavored theme nights. Each week, weather permitting, they’ll have music and dance from a specific locale, food from the same part of the world, and at sunset, a movie similarly themed. On my personal event docket are Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic The Red Balloon on August 6 (I don’t think I’m the only American with special memories of watching this film on 16mm in elementary school) and one of my favorite movies ever, Fellini’s 8 1/2, on August 13.

At Movies with a View at Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, films are also preceded by music, and food is provided by Rice (a restaurant group with a branch in DUMBO that began back in the mid-1990s with a hip tapas bar called Ñ 33 Crosby which is still there). On August 21, I will be there for Hal Ashby’s Being There. Best known for having written and directed Harold and Maude, Ashby was also the director of the politically charged Coming Home, which has the crazy sad scene that still ranks as one the top marriages of music and cinema in film history: Bruce Dern’s beach dive and Tim Buckley’s “Once.”

But back to the East River: Check out Dr. Vino’s NYC wineshop map to find a wine shop nearby to find a bottle to accompany your meal; just be discreet. As Dr. Vino mentions in his latest post, it’s not technically legal to crack wine at public parks, but the consensus is that as long as you are not obvious about it, the authorities are inclined to look the other way.

A friend of mine who, like me, has grappled with the lures and snares of cigarette addiction over the years, told me recently that a long period of non smoking once ended quite abruptly after viewing “Dont Look Back,” D.A. Pennebaker’s black-and-white mini-chronicle of Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour, in which our star is seen smoking pretty much at all times.

I thought about this while reading “Music ‘Can Enhance Wine Taste,’” a BBC News report of a university study on wine and music, which found that “people rated the change in taste by up to 60% depending on the melody heard.

“The researchers said cabernet sauvignon was most affected by ‘powerful and heavy’ music, and chardonnay by ‘zingy and refreshing’ sounds.”

For anyone who has ever entered a rowdy country music bar in the middle of a perfectly respectable work day and, upon hearing Johnny Cash singing ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ begins to rationalize that a shot of Patron silver tequila with a Pabst Blue Ribbon back would be a capital idea, these findings are old news.

Every moment has a vibe, and every vibe has the right soundtrack. And every soundtrack has the right kind of drink. The interplay of those three elements has always been fascinating to me. In many ways, the degree to which I vibe with people socially is a function of their sensitivity to those moments, those changes in vibe and the way all three elements come together.

The moment itself is usually the most decisive component in this trifecta; like matching a wine to a main course, it’s up to us to find the right beverage (and song) to go with a given moment. But sometimes a wine or a song can dictate the other two elements, and that where this study (and the Johnny Cash example) comes in:

“Professor [Adrian] North, [who administered the study, previously] conducted supermarket research which suggested people were five times more likely to buy French wine than German wine if accordion music was played in the background. If an oompah band was played, the German product outsold the French by two to one.”

Two weeks ago today, I moderated a Rioja tasting in the meatpacking district of New York, leading some of the city’s top wine practitioners in the press and restaurant industry through a series of Riojas blancos, rosados and tintos from a broad range of styles.

Largely the brainchild of Pia Mara Finkell of CRT/tanaka, the agency that administers the Vibrant Rioja campaign and at whose NYC offices the tasting took place, the panel tasting provided a unique, relaxed venue in which tasters of disparate backgrounds and palate preferences could have a free-form discussion about the wines being tasted, about the state of Rioja wine in general, and, occasionally, about the complex interplay today among winemakers, wine critics, and the consumers who keep the whole game in play.

Our point of departure was Rioja’s 2001 Gran Reservas. Gran Reserva is the age category at the summit of the Rioja’s age classification system, and 2001 has been widely regarded as one of the best to have been experienced in Rioja in many years. According to one of our panelists, Gerry Dawes, Paco Hurtado of Bodegas Marques de Riscal said that the fruit from the 2001 vintage was the best he’s ever seen.

But what made the biggest impression on me was how enthusiastically one of our whites, the Capellania from Marques de Murrieta, was received by our panel. I have written about this wine before: a new wine from a classic bodega undergoing major changes which nevertheless harkens back to a former time, when whites exhibiting the beguiling aromatic traits that can come only from controlled oxidation were the norm in Rioja. Six months ago, only one wine shop carried this wine; two weeks ago, I picked one up from Union Square Wine.

I guess what attracts me most to this wine, and to the sentiments with which it was received, is that hodgepodge of new and old. Just when you are tempted to disparage the fact that Marques de Murrieta, the oldest winery in Rioja, is cutting the oak time that its flagship Castillo Ygay sees, the current owner, the Conde de Creixell, and his ace winemaker, Ana Vargas, come up with the Capellania.

A study in contrast and a wrench in the black and white argument that rages among wine influentials these days. More thoughts to come.

Frying chorizo at the Fiesta de Vendimia de Rioja Alavesa, September 2007. Photo: John Barkley.

It’s one of those cravings that kicks in with some regularity this time of year, usually in the middle of the day: an unmistakable hankering for the garlicky, smoky-spicy, porky flavors of chorizo, the Spanish national sausage, believed to have originated in Extremadura but available around the corner from virtually every street in Spain.

Now that the warm weather has finally arrived to stay (and also considering the fact that the Spanish national soccer team is performing remarkably well in the Euro 2008 championship), there’s something celebratory about throwing chorizo on the grill. The smell and taste of melting pork fat combined with paprika, or pimentón, are just quintessentially Spanish.

Even more celebratory (and authentic) would be to get a hold of a porrón, a glass pitcher with a tiny spout on one end, and a couple of cold bottles of Rioja rosé, (I like Muga, El Coto, CVNE, López de Heredia and Marqués de Cáceres), grab a handful of baguettes, and make it a day, much the way Jorge Muga made our day during a vineyard visit last year.

If, as expected, Spain wins its group (Group D) in Euro 2008, they will play the runner up of Group C (most likely France or Italy) this Sunday, June 22 at 3pm Eastern Time, just about as good a day, time, and occasion for grilled chorizo as you’re ever likely to find.

Fire it up.

Chorizo hanging above a butcher’s counter in Logroño’s central market. Photo: Daniel Hertzell.

Summer served: Grilled chorizo, baguette, and a porrón filled with Muga rosé, September 2007. Photo: Adrian Murcia

Next month marks the 10th anniversary of my first visit to Rioja, a trip I have written about before. In Madrid for the wedding of my two (still) great friends Julian and Marta in July 1998, my (still) great friend Valerie and I headed north for a visit to Bilbao, by way of a small village in La Rioja’s Tierra de Cameros called El Rasillo, where we stayed the night.

I don’t have a scanner, but recently, I took digital photographs of the photo album I put together after the wedding (and preceding trip to Bilbao), which held a bunch of receipts, maps, ripped out journal entries, etc. A short selection of these follows.

I marked our trip in a yellow highlighter pen. We took the road to Alcala de Henares out of town, but came back a different way:

Here’s a detail of our map, which doesn’t list El Rasillo, but it lies along that little secondary road (LR 253) that wraps around the Embalse de González de Lacasa, a lake formed by the damming of the Río Iregua, one of the Ebro’s tributaries.

Valerie Dumova amid wildflowers, with the Embalse de González de Lacasa in the background:

Entering the Ebro Valley en route to Haro for lunch.

My receipt from lunch at Terete in Haro, specialists in traditional cordero asado, wood-roasted lamb:

A snippet from my journal, in which I describe my wine purchases:

A great picture of my lovely friend, Valerie Dumova:

Soy yo.