Blame it on Rioja

Taberna Almendro 13, Madrid, Spain, September 20, 2007. Photo: Adrian Murcia

One of my favorite spots anywhere in Spain is Taberna Almendro 13, not far from El Mercado de la Cebada in the neighborhood of La Latina in Old Madrid. My first visit was in 1993, when I was studying Spanish at the Unversidad Complutense de Madrid. It was a carefree time for me: the dollar strong, my obligations few, my bank account fat from years working at Washington, D.C.’s Restaurant Nora during college, living rent free with my parents, God bless ‘em.

Almendro 13 is where I developed a taste for both Manzanilla and Queso de la Serena, two products I would later explore at their respective source: Sanlúcar de Barrameda, near Cádiz, during a sommelier trip to Sherry country in 2005; and Castuera, a town nestled in the rolling hills of La Serena in eastern Extremadura, during a whirlwind study of Jamón Ibérico de Bellota in 2001 funded by a travel grant from the Geoffrey Roberts Trust.

But back in 1993, these two historic Spanish gastronomic wonders, and so many more, were mysteries unveiled daily, forming a constant parade of little gifts in unconventional packaging. Spain’s capital city, bathed in that special pink and blue twilight captured in the photograph above, presided over and abetted my personal transformation, as I settled into the novel sensation of being entirely at home in my own skin, perhaps because this was the first time in my life I felt like there was no other place in the world I would rather be.

Alemendro 13 has in many ways become the symbol of that transformation for me, a place that I never fail to visit every time I’m in Madrid, no matter how brief my stay or busy my agenda, a subconscious but effectively mandatory pilgrimage that’s both a private tribute to bygone innocence and a grateful acknowledgment of its having first lit the path I continue to walk to this day.

View from Finca Valpiedra, September 11, 2007

Tuesday, September 11, 2007
3:30pm
On the road to Cenicero

Lachlan Cox at Finca Valpiedra was admirably accommodating with us today, a big relief as logistics become harder and harder to juggle. I saw an opportunity to have both groups, production and sommelier, coincide at Valpiedra at 12:30 p.m. today, which is all well and good except for that fact I had to ask Cox if we could cut into his time with the sommeliers so that we could pull them out one by one and interview them on Valpiedra’s front patio, with the Ebro River in the foreground and the Sierra de Cantabria in the background.

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As mentioned in my last post, I taught a class at Murray’s Cheese Greenwich Village on Tuesday, September 24, called Viva Rioja. Below is our lineup of wine and cheese:

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Author’s Note: My “Letters from Haro” series will resume on Friday, picking up where we left off last, on Tuesday afternoon, September 11. My notebook and laptop contain enough reflections, profiles, and images to keep “Letters” going for at least another month, but in the interest of brevity, coverage of my recent trip to Rioja should wrap up sometime next week. And although I have been back in the U.S. for over a week now, I will continue using the same title for the series, a nod to consistency and a reflection of the fact that much of what you will read was indeed written while I was still on the ground in Spain.

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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)

Roger flew into the kitchen around 6:15 to tell me that he was about to serve our wine and cheese tasting party their first wine, Pol Roger Brut NV Champagne, and I was a little worried. Champagne is so delicate and so subtle; it’s hard to find a cheese that won’t bully it. I tried it with a youngish raw milk French goat’scheese, Chabichou de Poitou, but it left the bubbly tasting bitter. Same thing happened with the cow’s milk great, Jasper Hill’s Constant Bliss. So, I decided to go with only one cheese, Nettle Meadow Farm’s Kunik, a triple-creme goat’s milk cheese from New York State, fortified with Jersey cream. With a little dollop of our pastry department’s kumquat marmalade, the trio turned into a perfect summer snack, like eating an apricot scone topped with clotted cream, followed by a sip of mimosa.

Next came both the Chabichou and the Bliss, as well as Tomme de la Chataigneraie (nutty, creamy, mildly goaty deliciousness from Auvergne) with an Arneis from Piedmont, from a producer called Pertinace, a white with both body and acidity.

Then we served duo of Pecorini (Pecorino Zaffrano from Tuscany, raw sheep’s milk, rubbed with saffron; and Pecorino Ginepro from Lazio, rubbed with balsamic vinegar and crushed juniper) with an unusual Italian red made from the Uva Rara grape (a.k.a. Bonarda), and the slight vegetal and earthy character of the wine met the cheese nicely.

My favorite pairing was the fourth: Tomme Crayeuse, Cabot Cloth-bound Cheddar Aged at Jasper Hill, and Chevrotin with the Cabernet-dominated Mas de Daumas Gassac 2004 from Languedoc, France. Wow. That one kinda floored us. The wine was so meaty and gamey; rich but not cloying; ripe but distinguishable from a New World wine. Cheddar tends to do well with earthy Cabernets; the other two, a cow and a goat from the Haute Savoie, both super mountainy, were in great form that night, and it took one look from Roger when we checked out the wine on his hunch to see that we were thinking the same thing.

Our couple decided to end at five cheese courses, and I can’t really blame them. (That’s a whole lotta cheese). But we were happy we had the chance to serve a Sherry, Gonzalez-Byass’ “Apostoles” Palo Cortado, and to pair it with the Comte-like Pleasant Ridge Reserve Extra Aged and Jasper Hill Farm’s Bartlett Blue, a lovely way to close any night. So lovely, in fact, that that’s precisely how I ended my night several hours later: copita in one hand, dense hunk of cow love in the other.

Got to work last night and learned just before service that a table due to arrive in twenty minutes had requested a six-course wine and cheese tasting. Master Sommelier Roger Dagorn and I had no choice but to figure it out as we went along. I don’t know if it was the arrival of the summer solstice or the pressure, but somehow we turned it out. My colleagues look puzzled as Roger and I snarfed multiple samples of cheese from the board between gulps of wine, but our table seemed pleased. Part of me wishes we were miked and filmed because we both knew that our crazy exercise, created in just ten or fifteen minutes of tasting and rapid fire brainstorming, produced some seriously delicious combinations, and it was fun knowing how we got there.

Next post: Our lineup of wine and cheese.