Blame it on Rioja

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.

In 2006, I’ve had the good fortune of visiting Rioja twice, first in late May, when the region’s vines had just begun to flower, and again in late October, just after harvest. The picture that emerged is one of a region in flux, an enclave of impeccable taste in the midst of reinventing itself while simultaneously staying true to its essential character, to what it knows and does the best. (more…)