Blame it on Rioja

In the first half of 2003, the formidable New York art cinema house, Film Forum, held an extended run of a newly restored 1970 film written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville called “Le Cercle Rouge,” starring Alain Delon, Gina Maria Volonté, and Yves Montand. By the time I got around to heading across town to see it, it was spring, a Sunday as I recall. That was the weekend of Sakura Matsuri (Cherry Blossom Festival) at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, one of the most soul-soothing spring exercises a New Yorker can experience in a public space, and I headed immediately to Brooklyn after catching the first showing of Melville’s film.

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Hugh Crickmore in 2006. Photo: Carol Hartsell

One of these days someone should devote some serious research time looking into why so many people who are really into wine (and food) are also really into music, either as aficionados or musicians.

It probably has a lot to do with the sensually transportive nature of food and wine, the appreciation of which is largely driven by the olfactory sense, and how a great gastronomic experience in the right company can turn a simple human necessity into an emotionally gratifying moment far removed from the daily grind, or even from the simple passage of time.

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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.

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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.

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Dutch Angle/Spanish Wine: (From left) ADM, photographer Nigel Barker, and Rebeca Gomez of Rioja’s Consejo Regulador, New York City, Wednesday, December 5, 2007. Photo: Kendyl Wright.

While admittedly not an avid television watcher, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t pretty damn cool to lead a Rioja tasting a few weeks ago at the studios of photographer Nigel Barker, a judge on the CW Network’s America’s Next Top Model.

Mr. Barker is a professed fan of Rioja and of pretty much all things Spanish, having lived in Spain for many years with his family, and he struck up a friendship with Vibrant Rioja’s Kendyl Wright during September’s Fashion Week, for which Rioja was the official wine. In the event, Kendyl arranged for a tasting at the photographer’s studio in the Meatpacking District in early December and asked me to lead it.

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One of the season’s chichiest wine events, the annual New York Wine Experience, spills out onto the carpeted terraces of the Marriott Marquis tomorrow night, inaugurating a three-day extravaganza of oenophilic excess set to the dulcet tones of Lite FM.

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David Moreno takes justifiable pride in the success of his bodega in Badarán, a small village in La Rioja Alta not far from the storied monasteries at Yuso and Suso. When I met him last year, he told me that 14,000 visitors had come through the doors of his Bordelais chateaux-inspired winery in 2005, that transactions at the bodega itself account for a considerable portion of his total sales, and that “we never close.” Demand for his Wine Club–in which members purchase wine by the barrel and pay regular visits to the vaulted underground cellar to enjoy their wine with friends and family amid its soul-soothing calm and flattering light–has never been higher. Moreno exudes the quietly triumphant air of someone who has created something quite lovely from scratch, and that’s pretty much what happened.

He makes a typically broad spectrum of wines, from Blanco Joven to High Expression (called Vobiscum), and I was quite taken by his 2002 Seleccion de la Familia Crianza, aged in a combination of French and American oak, so much so that I took a bottle home with me, since his wine does not yet have American representation.

But the highlight of our afternoon visit came at the end. Fond of working alone late at night, Moreno’s daughter Gemma told us during lunch, David passes the time singing local folk tunes called jotas, a song form that falls somewhere between medieval English ballads and early-19th-century German song cycles a la Schumann and Schubert.

After a little gentle coaxing on our part, Moreno agreed to sing for us. For twenty minutes or so, no one said a word, and the only sound in the cavernous underground space was Moreno’s earnest and unwavering baritone, creating in short order an unforgettable experience bordering on the magical.

(Photo courtesy Jose Guerra)