Blame it on Rioja

While researching patatas a la riojana for a recent post on a wine dinner in Connecticut, I came across a series of cooking videos made in Spanish by a blogger in San Sebastián named José Mari. His blog is called Cocinar para los amigos, or ‘Cook for your friends,’ and I am having a really hard time trying NOT to watch all of them, TONIGHT.

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THESE ARE NOT SHOTS: A scene from Bar Aralar Taberna in San Sebastián.

This week I will be posting daily reports from a trip I made to northern Spain last week with a group of sommeliers and journalists from the U.S. We spent most of our time, of course, paying visits to Rioja bodegas and vineyards, getting to know a bit more about the stories behind the bottles we tasted, but we began our journey in San Sebastián, where, in all of the great pintxos bars downtown you basically have five options by the glass: un cidra (cider), un txacolí (a spritzy, refreshing white wine made in nearby Guetaría with white and red grapes), una caña (a short glass of beer), un crianza (i.e., a Rioja crianza), or un reserva (i.e., Rioja reserva)*.

Monday, September 9, 2008

ARRIVAL
All members of our group accounted for at Bilbao airport. The ever-agreeable Kelly Bucher of the Vibrant Rioja team, a veteran of last year’s whirlwind sommelier/CIA production combo-platter trip that nearly did us in, is my co-host. Alfredo Ogueta, with whom I have traveled in Rioja now on four occasions, is our driver again for this trip, an enormous asset, given his driving skills, impeccable promptness, and his willingness to make phone calls to bodegas and Rioja’s Consejo Regulador, our hosts, on my behalf.

Lost luggage among one in our group sadly meant that our original plan to have lunch in the town of Guetaria at Elkano–a fish restaurant that Gerry Dawes once called “one of the finest in Spain, if not the world”–would not be possible. I had grappled with the wisdom of going straight to lunch from the airport but had concluded that most food and wine people would be willing to push through their jet lag to enjoy such high quality fish and one of Europe’s best wine lists, but my theory would not be tested today.

It was decided that we would go straight to our hotel in San Sebastián and enjoy pintxos later that evening in the city’s old quarter, or parte vieja.

Kelly and I step outside to go over the night’s plan and extract Euros from an ATM a block away. A woman in her early twenties in line behind us wears a t-shirt from CBGB, the infamous, now defunct punk club two blocks from my apartment. We step out onto the promenade overlooking the city’s famous Concha inlet and beach. The weather is perfect and, for a moment, I silently try to calculate a way to run upstairs, throw on a bathing suit, race into the water, come back, shower, and dress, all in time to meet everyone in the lobby in one hour. I abandon my dream.

OUTING
We’re a pretty big group, nine in all: Kelly, myself, plus five sommeliers from around the country and two journalists. They are:

Russel Corzine, Sommelier at Joe’s Prime Steak, Seafood, and Crab, Chicago, IL

Kelli Farwell, Wine Director for the Dressler Restaurant Group in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Rosie Gordon, Sommelier at Plumpjack Cafe, San FranciscoDavid Rosengarten, freelance journalist

David Rosengarten, freelance journalist

Tim Teichgraeber, freelance journalist

Gretchen Thomas, Beverage Director, Barcelona Restaurant Group, Connecticut

Barbara Werley MS, Beverage Director, Pappas Brothers Restaurant Group, Texas

Wild mushrooms, ham, and hake at Casa Tiburcio, San Sebastián

We make our way through the many pintxos (tapas) bars in the parte vieja, an activity the locals call txiquiteo [chee-khee-TAY-o] named after the squat little wine glasses the locals call txiquito (and Riojanos call chatos). Although it’s a Monday, with a couple of my favorites (Bar Borda-Berri, Goiz-Argi) closed for the evening, most bars remain open, including Bar Aralar Taberna, where slices of gamey jamon ibérico pair nicely with a Campillo 2007 Rioja Rosado as well as an uncharacteristically ripe 2001 Viña Alberdí Reserva from Bodegas La Rioja Alta); La Cepa, home to the best revuelto, or soft scramble, in the world, made with ultra fresh gambas and eggs no more than two days old; and Casa Tiburcio, whose wild mushroom dish (which includes the glorious perechico, a mushroom I have written about before) was lemony, earthy, and prodigiously habit-forming.

We finish our night at Bar Bergara across town, known for its creative pintxos. A canape topped with a mousseline of wild mushrooms, cream, and shrimp thrown under the salamander for a few seconds sounds simple enough, but, man alive, it put me under a little happy-trance, an experience punctuated by occasional snorts of Roda I 2004 Rioja.

By that point most of us are at the end of the line. I do wish we could stay here for another day or two. The beach is calling out to me. But we have a few big days ahead of us. It’s time to rest before heading over the mountain into San Sebastián’s chief supplier of red wine, Rioja.

TARANTINO TAPAS CRAWL: From left to right, Gretchen Thomas, David Rosengarten, Tim Teichgraeber, and Kelli Farwell in San Sebastián.

*The reason for the masculine article preceding a feminine noun (un crianza, un reserva) is the unsaid “vaso de,” or “glass of,” or “vino de,” or “wine with”

The wine list at Rekondo, San Sebastián, September 17, 2007. Photo: Adrian Murcia.

Last week, a colleague of mine at Chanterelle, Gayle Dewindt–a biking Brooklynite most likely on a first-name basis with every purveyor of fine consumables in all five boroughs–brought into work a few slices of smoked duck breast from the Blue Ribbon Bakery Market, and shared it with the rest of the staff in between our first and second seating. It was so good, so perfectly seasoned, so satisfyingly smoky in a way that recalled both being inside Louie Mueller’s Barbecue in Taylor, Texas and smelling the first firewood smoke of the season in the autumns of my youth, that I did a little jig, a smoked duck gig.

Well that’s sort of how I felt this past September in San Sebastián when a very nice lady at Rekondo handed me the restaurant’s wine list. I had heard about this place from R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia managing director María José López de Heredia, who told me last year that the restaurant carried vintages of her family’s wines that she herself did not have in her own bodega. I had also read about it in an article by Jancis Robinson and in another article written by Gerry Dawes, but nothing had prepared me for the moment when I would actually be holding the restaurant’s wine list in my hands.

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To the short list of 2007’s best writing on Spanish gastronomy, add Mike Steinberger’s San Sebastián on Six Meals a Day: The Making of a Culinary Mecca, an article that recently appeared on Slate.com. Mr. Steinberger devotes significantly more column inches to Donostia’s Michelin-starred alta cocina than to the equally relevant downtown pintxos scene, but he does a great job of placing the present gastronomic moment in San Sebastián, and indeed in all of modern Spain, into its proper geographic and historical context; in other words, he’s as interested in understanding how the city came to its role as “the epicenter of Spain’s culinary revolution” as he is in describing in minute detail the stuff that he ate there (and we didn’t).

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