Blame it on Rioja

Albondigas at Kate Zaharra, Bilbao. Photo: Gretchen Thomas

Until recently, the only thought I ever really gave to cooked spheres of seasoned ground meat was the undeniable fact that albondigas [al-BONE-dee-gahs], the Spanish word for meatballs, was just as much fun to say out loud as its English counterpart.

That was until I had the albondigas de solomillo con salsa de foie at Kate Zaharra in Bilbao almost three months ago, a dish I was not inclined to request until the extremely charming and solicitous co-owner Patricio Valiño emphatically recommended it.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, Gretchen Thomas had also ordered the dish, and a couple of weeks ago while we were co-hosting a wine dinner at Barcelona Restaurant in Greenwich, Connecticut, somehow the subject of Kate Zaharra’s meatballs came up, and, well, I think we might have had a moment of silence, eyes closed, long breaths taken in, adjectives exchanged, all in praise of this particular meatball.

Solomillo is a beef fillet or tenderloin, a cut that gave Kate Zaharra’s meatballs a clean, buttery, melt-in-the-mouth quality.  And, of course, the ‘foie’ in the sauce was none other than duck foie gras, which probably sounds to you like adding butter to butter, but it worked without feeling that porterhouse-at-Peter Luger’s brand of decadence. The only accompaniment besides was a handful of crispy potato nuggets, a useful vehicle for the leftover sauce, none of which remained on my plate as the night drew to a close. The overall seasoning was spot on, the portion size just enough.

Of the many wines we tried that evening, the Heredad Ugarte Dominio de Ugarte Rioja Reserva 2001(magnum) was my top choice to pair with Kate Zaharra’s exceptional albondigas. Available for purchase online at Cato’s Wine Cellar, based in Coral Gables, Florida, for $39.00 per 1.5 liter bottle.

Chanterelle Master Sommelier Roger Dagorn had told me that I would have fun traveling with seasoned food and wine journalist David Rosengarten, who accompanied us on our last trip to Spain, but I wasn’t quite expecting to find myself engaged in twenty-minute, Rioja-fueled, aristocratic English-inflected improvisational comedy act with Rosengarten and Chicago-based sommelier Russel Corzine on the front patio of Kate Zaharra restaurant overlooking the twinkling city of Bilbao at two o’clock in the morning.

Which is exactly what happened on our last night in Spain, which for multitudinous reasons was equal parts hedonistic, surreal, and belly-achingly hilarious. I am not sure what our audience of one, Kelly Bucher, thought of our stream-of-consciousness routine, but we were amused. The details of what we actually said are a little hazy, but I do remember at one point Corzine gesturing out to the city lights in the distance and saying something like, “Don’t you see the campfires of your loyal subjects, my liege? They burn tonight in anticipation of this momentous decision.”

I thought of this moment when I read Rosengarten’s terrific blog entry on the trip, “Love Letter to Red Rioja,” which betrays only the slightest hint of how that particular night ended, referring to the “baronial chairs” to be found in the wine-bedecked cellar of Kate Zaharra, where one begins the evening at this gem of a restaurant drinking wine and snacking on jamón iberico. It was precisely my decision to sit at the head of table when we first arrived, in one of those throne-like chairs, that led to all this “my liege” business and, ultimately, to our quasi-chemically-induced experimental theater.

Beyond all that rush of nostalgia, the article confirmed that my erstwhile traveling companion came to a conclusion about the wines of Rioja that demonstrates that he was most definitely paying close attention:

I arrived in Rioja with a smidge of cynicism about its now-famous modernization, because I really loved the way things were 20 years ago. But I quickly discovered something amazing. Red Rioja today is not a simple battlefield of traditionalists vs. modernists. Red Rioja today is a smorgasbord, where a very wide range of red-wine types is being generated. Sure, it ’s much harder to keep track than ever….but if you know what you’re doing, red Rioja is a very amusing playground.

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.

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