Blame it on Rioja

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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CLASSIC COMBINATION: Chuletillas de cordero asadas (Grilled baby lamb chops), piquillo peppers, and fries, taken at Posada Mayor de Migueloa, Laguardia, Spain, September 9, 2007.  Photo: Jon Stamell.

It’s that time of year when one of viticulture’s most bracing demands comes a-callin’: the winter pruning of the vines.  By clipping the canes of each plant after the vines have shut down for the winter, a wine grower can reduce the quantity of fruiting buds and, therefore, improve the quality of the buds that eventually flower and bear fruit later in the season.

In Western Europe, the practice of grilling meat over the smoldering embers of vine clippings dates back several thousand years. In Rioja, the ancient practice of cooking meat over sarmientos in fact came to define the regional cuisine, and today traditional asadores, restaurants specializing in grilled meat, are still everywhere, thriving even as edgier cooking has made its way into the valley.

At the same time, Rioja’s cuisine helped to shape the evolution of its wine.  John Radford points out in Wines of Rioja that, even if it were possible, it’s unlikely that a red wine like Rioja would have fared very well along the seafood-rich estuaries of coastal Galicia. In other words, razor clams and sea scallops called out for high-acid, aromatic whites (i.e., Rias  Baixas, Ribeiro, Valdeorras); in Rioja, grilled baby lamb chops, or chuletillas de cordero, called out for something quite different.

And speaking of lamb chops, a reader named Marco Romano left a comment on one of my most recent posts and confessed that “Rioja is the wine that turned me into a lover of wine with food. Grilled lamb chops marinated in olive oil, garlic, pimenton, cumin and arbol chilies over charcoal with a Rioja reserva. Ah…”

Of course, I immediately asked for a recipe, and he quickly complied.

As for the grape vines, well, that’s the hard part.  A 2006 Wine News article on cooking with vines, written by Carole Kotkin, suggested contacting Kalmazoo Outdoor Gourmet, which sells grape vine chips, although I took a look at the website, and “grape vines” appears to be missing from the order form, even though it’s mentioned as an option on the product list. A phone call is definitely in order.

Or you can do what I plan to do next week, after I get back from Napa: call your nearest winery.

Grilled Marinated Lamb Chops
Recipe submitted by Marco Romano
4 loin chops, or 8 baby loin chops (chuletillas), if you want to get really authentic
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tsp. sherry vinegar
3 cloves roasted or raw minced garlic
1 tsp+ pimenton
1 tsp+ ground cumin
Ground arbol chilies* to taste
Salt & pepper

Mix the oil and vinegar with the garlic and spices, and marinate lamb for 2-4 hrs. at room temperature. Grill over hardwood in an outdoor pit.**

Serves Two
Wine Pairing Suggestions: Mr. Romano recommends the following Reservas

Lopez de Heredia “Vina Tondonia”
Muga “Seleccion Especial”
Contino
CVNE
Sierra Cantabria
Marques de Murrieta
Monte Real
Rioja Alta
Vina Real

*Chiles de Arbol, usually sold whole, are available at Latin markets across the country and at select Whole Foods.

**A good substitute for vine chips would be chips of some easier to find fruit woods: apple, apricot, cherry, nectarine, or peach.  Check out barbecuewood.com or kalamazogourmet.com. I must confess that I have never cooked with wood before, but the three websites linked in this post seem to have enough information to steer us in the right direction. Still, proceed with caution.

Photos and styling: Lisa Leonard Lee

I opened my inbox yesterday to find that my friend Lisa had not only taken the time to write down the recipe for the wonderful lamb tagine Violeta and I enjoyed with her and her husband Billy at their home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn Sunday night, but also made the dish again to test the recipe and take these lovely photographs!

“The photo I took of the tagine on Sunday was horrid,” she wrote me. “So I decided to remake the tagine, for my own culinary edification, and to get you a proper recipe, with photo.”

There is a special place in my heart for perfectionists.

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Rioja Superstar: Jesus Madrazo of Contino, September 14, 2007. Photo: John Barkley.

During our second hot air balloon flight over Rioja, when we were up higher than we had any damn right to be, I noticed our pilot Laureano turning his ear toward the sounds of unseen aircraft in the distance with a slightly worried expression on his face. I thought to myself, man, that would really suck if we get clipped by a plane right now.

Which made our visit to Bodegas Contino in Laserna, the first appointment on our docket after our early-morning, high-altitude brush with eternity, a particularly sweet reaffirmation of life.

It’s hard to think of a better way to celebrate life than raising a glass of Contino. Jesus Madrazo, winemaker at Contino and a member of the family that founded CVNE, Contino’s parent company, is one of Rioja’s unmitigated superstars, and his wines are spectacular.

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In Spanish, asar, means “to roast”; close your eyes, say either version of that glorious verb out loud, making sure to exaggerate your consonants a little, and I promise that you will hear the sound of sizzling fat.

An asador is a restaurant that specializes in roasting a variety of meat in a wood-fired brick oven. It is also the name of the metal instrument - a spit, roasting jack, or clamping gridiron - that allows you to secure your meat and put it close to a heat source without burning your hand.

Spain puts a high premium on meats cooked using this method, and in my experience, the two areas that do it best and take it most seriously, are Segovia, a province in Castilla-Leon north of Madrid, and the whole of La Rioja - two landlocked regions with an abundant supply of the beverage best-suited to complement the slightly charred, moist-on-the-inside, fatty goodness of roast meat: Tempranillo-based red wine.

At a time when most of the attention being paid to Spanish cuisine centers on the avant-garde, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the traditional meat roast. But as in the worlds of wine and architecture in Spain, tradition in contemporary Spanish cooking still thrives, as I discovered last fall at Meson Chuchi, a gem of a restaurant in the town of Fuenmayor, near Logrono, in La Rioja.

While there’s plenty of fish on the menu at Chuchi - hake, sea bass, roguet - it takes one look around the packed room at midday to discover that this is more of a meat crowd. There are two kitchens, one an oven fired by oak logs and grape vines where eight types of meats are roasted, and another, typical kitchen for everything else. Manned by full-time roastmaster, the oven room is encased in see-thru glass and visible from the dining room (pictured above).

Much as I wanted a well-rounded meal including vegies and fish, my intrepid dining companions, Kiri and Mark, agreed to my carnivorous suggestion that we order cabrito asado (roast baby goat), cochinillo (roast suckling pig), and the dish most typical of all in this part of the world, chuletillas de cordero (a stack of garlicky roast lamb chops with a bite-size morsel of meat on each bone).

With a house salad and a plate of fries mixed with blistered local green peppers, we laid into the meat. The baby goat made the biggest impression on me, primarily because you don’t see it on a whole lot of American menus beyond Texas Hill country, and therefore was an unusual treat for me. Denser and leaner than the suckling pig (which was pretty stellar in its own right, possessing as it did the requisite combo of smoky/juicy meat and crispy skin) the cabrito was almost as juicy as the cochinillo, and had a barely discernible gamey, almost lamb-like flavor. The lamb chops, dusted liberally with coarse sea salt just before serving, were like baby lollipops that allowed me to savor lamb in one hand, a glass Rioja on the other.

And speaking of…the wine list at Chuchi is a Rioja lover’s visual lollipop: twelve pages of Rioja, alphabetized by bodega and including a separate page devoted to vinos de alta expresion, or high expression wines, with two pages for everything else. Curiously, none of the vintages are listed, but I suspect this might have to do with concerns about printing costs. I settled on one of my favorites of the modern producers, Remírez de Ganuza 2001 Reserva from Rioja Alavesa, a dense and lively wine with great concentration, made with 90% Tempranillo and 10% Graciano, aged in a combination of French and American oak. Nearly opaque in color, its acidity nevertheless stood up to and harmonized with the rich meaty and smoky flavors of the roast meat.

I wasn’t exactly bouncing with energy after so much protein, fat, and alcohol in the middle of the day, but the experience was worth the sluggishness it induced, and if I had a way to transport myself there this very minute and still be back in time for work tonight, you’d better believe I’d do it.

Meson Chuchi
Carretera de Vitoria, 2
Fuenmayor, La Rioja
tel. + 941 45 04 22