Blame it on Rioja

Miguel Angel de Gregorio standing in his El Calvario vineyard near the town of Briones, Spain, September 11, 2007. Briones visible in the background. Photo: John Barkley.

My respect for film and video directors, scriptwriters, producers, etc., jumped a hundred-fold this winter as found myself neck deep in the tedious, time-consuming but ultimately extraordinarily gratifying work of piecing together the two-hour educational documentary tentatively titled, “Magic at the Limits of Viticulture,” a collaboration between D.O.Ca. Rioja and the Culinary Institute of America Greystone scheduled for a DVD release later this year.

In upcoming posts I will go into more detail about each stage of the production, bringing us up to where we are now. It was completely new territory for me and an object lesson in the importance of breaking down all of the myriad tasks involved into little pieces, as opposed to looking at it as a whole and getting buried under the weight of trying to do too much at once. I have the great luxury of working with an incredible team at Vibrant Rioja and CIA Greystone; another lesson was learning how to ask for help.

Why “Magic at the Limits of Viticulture”?

Well, as I said, it’s a working title, and I’m nervous about using the word “magic” for fear of sounding too new-agey or like too much like we’re making a hard sell (although they have been very hands-off up to now, the project is financed by the region itself), but there are reasons behind it.

As I was reviewing all 30 hours video and looking over two binders of transcripts in December and January, it became clear to me that we had on our hands some really amazing material, and that in that material, there emerged a handful of captured moments that would profoundly affect how I conceptualized the organization of the story.

One of those moments came on day two, in a vineyard outside Briones call El Calvario, with Finca Allende proprietor and winemaker Miguel Angel de Gregorio. No matter how you feel about his wines, the man brings so much passion and respect to his work–for wine, terrior, vines, Rioja–it’s infectious. I remember that when we closed the interview, I turned around, clenched one fist and whispered to myself “yes!” because I knew we had just captured something special. My colleagues, none of whom speaks enough Spanish to understand what had just transpired, we unphased. “You’ll see,” I told them.

Spain has almost 70 different Denomaciones de Origen, what does Rioja have that no one else has?

That’s one of the questions I asked Miguel Angel de Gregorio. Here’s my translation of his response.

Uy! Tantas cosas. Rioja es mágica….

Uy! So many things. Rioja is magic. Rioja is unique and inimitable, first, because of the richness and diversity of its terroirs.

No other area in Spain has such a rich endowment of terroirs: diverse soil types, varied expositions to the sun, these mountainous elevations.

There is a second reason: we’re an Atlantic climate in a Mediterranean country, in a warm and dry country.

We have our share of water shortages; in a typical year, Briones will get about 600 liters of rainfall, which is less than half of what Bordeaux gets. This is why we still grow bush vines instead of training our vines higher.

At the same time, we’re influenced by winds coming in from the Atlantic. Ours is one of those climates at the limits of the viticulture. Go 10 to 15 kilometers beyond this vineyard, and vines won’t ripen, they cannot ripen. We’ve already reached the limit, that limit where you’ll find all the great wine-producing areas of the world: Alsace, Bordeaux, Burgundy, Piedmont. They’re all found in marginal climates, where vineyards almost shouldn’t exist. But this is where you find aromatic complexity, that complexity of elements in perfect alignment, where vineyards using the same grape variety are nevertheless unique and unrepeatable.

Stay tuned for more excerpted interviews.

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.

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.

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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At a time when the notion of a wine bar has evolved into a sleek, all too often sterile formula, it’s refreshing to encounter a place like Casa Montes, a semi dive in the colorful Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid owned and operated by the charming and slightly cantankeroous 66-year-old César Montes.

Casa Montes is on the southern end of the neighborhood’s main sqaure, and the line separating bar overflow from plaza layabouts gets a little blurred on balmy evenings. Despite extensive gentrification in recent years, Lavapiés maintains a palpable bohemian edge, and its streets at night are filled with a melting pot of students, artists, immigrants, drug dealers, hardened working-class outdoor drinkers, and quasi-revolutionaries.

Inside, bottles of wine line rows of shelves running the entire length of the back wall, each with César’s handwritten evaluation, often in verse, affixed to it. It’s sort of like the descriptions you see poked into different varieties of cheese in a typical American cheese shop, although I have yet to see a cheese description written in iambic pentameter.

The stainless steel bar itself runs parallel to that same wall, effectively creating a contiguous buffer between proprietor and patron except for a 3′ by 4′ opening below the bar, through which patrons occasionally crouch in order to gain entry to a tiny alcove behind the bar, evidently an office/storage room where, rumor had it, a bathroom could be found.

The top of the bar, strewn with crumpled napkins and half empty bottles of wine, supports a five-spout beer tap and a long glass case filled with cheese, cured meats, and other, less readily identifiable (and decidedly less appetizing) fruits of the butcher’s toil.

The all-Spanish selection is broad and varied, with countless labels not available in the U.S., and overall, the quality is high.

Just don’t ask for white wine. César is a member of the ‘we drink only red wine in these parts’ school of thought, the old school of Old Castile, if you will.

Go ahead and order beer if you’d like. But if you’re a guy, just make sure you don’t ever order a clara, equal parts draft beer and a sweet, clear, Sprite-like soda called gaseosa, widely viewed in much of Spain as a ‘girl’s drink.’ I witnessed one guy doing just that, and César took great pleasure in disdainfully calling the hapless fellow’s masculinity into question, without blinking an eye.

On June 3, I finally got my wish to host a Sunday Salon at Chanterelle devoted entirely to the Spain, and I was blown away by the demand: we sold something like 80 seats before it even made it to the press, with around 60 folks on the waiting list. I mean, it’s not like tasting six wines and six cheeses in one of the most serene and beautiful dining rooms in the city for $55 is a hard sell, but still, I was flattered.

We started off with passed trays of food (serrano ham wrapped around Galia melon and mint; grilled shrimp with red pepper aioli; smoked trout “ceviche” on housemade chips) accompanied by glasses of Hidalgo “La Gitana” Manzanilla Sherry, that lean and almondy fino-style Sherry that screams out for food, one of the world’s best misunderstood wines. Some people loved it, others, I think, were a little confused at how I could profess my love to such a weird beverage.

Here is a list of our wine and cheese line-up, with my comments on the pairing in italics:

1. Tetilla (Pasteurized cow’s milk; Galicia) paired with Do Ferreiro Rebisaca 2005 Rías Baixas (made from the Treixadura and Albariño grapes, Galicia). This wine, one of many stunners brought in by importer Andre Tamers, was beautiful: with melon and citrus aromas and great acidity, which cut right through the fatty Tetilla.
2. Cabra Romero (Pasteurized goat’s milk; Murcia) with Ameztoi “Rubentis” Txakolina Rosado 2006 (Hondarrabi Zuri and Hondarrabi Beltza; País Vasco). Two unsual finds: the cheese is rather a nightmare to cut, covered as it is with endless slimy spears of rosemary, but quite lovely to eat; the wine has a beautiful color, a faint lemon/strawberry nose, and a grapefruit-like tartness. Together they worked well, aided by a little Star Thistle Honey from Colorado for sweet relief.
3. Garrotxa (Pasteurized goat’s milk; Catalunya) with R. López de Herredia Viña Tondonia Rioja Reserva Blanco 1989 (Viura and Malvasia; La Rioja) I have paired these two before, and it always seems to work. God, I love this wine. I think there were some in our (quite young) audience who didn’t get it, but I sure hope they do one day, it’s one of the region’s unique treasures: honeyed, nutty, citrusy, very unusual and heady in its subtle seductive power.
4. Mil Ovejas (Raw sheep’s milk; Extremadura) and Miguel Merino Rioja Reserva 2000 (Tempranillo and Graciano; La Rioja) Thanks to Max Schrem at Formaggio Essex for turning me onto this great Manchego-like cheese. Flavors of butter and herbs and faint citrus linger in the mouth long after you swallow it. The Merino Reserva was great, as always, with judicious oaky notes not getting in the way of a flavor that for me defines the entire country. Only caveat is that this wine needed decanting, as it was a little tight right out of the bottle. Its aromatics need some coaxing, which is to say, time and oxygen, perhaps a function of its vintage.
5. Uplands Farm Pleasant Ridge Reserve (Raw cow’s milk; Wisconsin) with Sandeman “Royal Corregidor” V.O.S. Oloroso Sherry NV (Palomino Fino and Pedro Ximénez, Andalucía). This crazy good aged Sherry is a match made in heaven for Gruyere-style, cooked-curd, pressed raw cow’s milk cheese, and Spain doesn’t make anything like it, so I turned to Wisconsin. Yum.
6. Monte Enebro (Pastuerized goat’s milk; Castilla-León) with Pedro Domecq “Venerable” V.O.R.S. PX Sherry (Pedro Ximénez; Andalucía) I sorta broke the bank with this very expensive aged PX Sherry but there was nothing we tasted that day to compare with the finesse and power of this miraculous pairing.

Spain has embraced innovation with extraordinary vigor since its transition to democracy thirty years ago—so much so that today Spain is virtually synonymous with what’s modern and cutting edge. Yet, as Giles Tremlett writes in his book, Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and its Silent Past (Walker & Co., 2006), “few countries hold on to and nurture their traditions so tenderly or so enthusiastically [as Spain].” Somehow, Tremlett continues, “tradition and modernity…manage to fit snugly together.”

One of the most startling examples of this harmonic convergence of old and new in Spain can be found at the R. Lopez de Heredia Vina Tondonia winery in Haro, where Rioja’s most ardent defender of the classic style of winemaking recently commissioned one of the country’s most strikingly modern structures.

According to Maria Jose Lopez de Heredia, the bodega’s eloquent and tireless managing director, it was the only commission architect Zaha Hadid has ever considered via email.

What made the Lopez project so compelling for Hadid?

Project architect Jim Heverin from Hadid’s London offices explains:

The project was very ambitious in scope from the beginning, operating on various scales and timescales: a pavilion for a temporary fair in Barcelona which could be relocated back to Haro within a new visitor center/ museum which would reshape the image of a very old classical Rioja bodega. It was an intriguing combination of scopes with a client who was willing to consider all options. At all scales there was the constant thread of the new confronting the old. The pavilion would house an older pavilion, the new pavilion would sit within the old bodega and the new museum would sit within the same context. The client came to us from a friend’s recommendation and inspired by our coverage in the El Croquis magazine. She asked by email to see us and when she came we didn’t speak much, she spoke for several hours by which stage we felt part of the family. It was even more intriguing that she chose us when one sees how they work at their bodega: techniques of wine production unaltered by fashions and preserved from one generation to the next. So for her to ask us to design a new pavilion was quite a leap of faith for her, and we couldn’t really refuse someone who displayed such faith in us.

The old pavilion had been found in their outhouses and restored to its original condition. It had been originally commissioned by the great grandfather for the world fair exhibition in 1910. The proprietors of the bodega had a long succession of adding their built presence to the tradition of the bodega. The new pavilion was to be exhibited at the Alimentaria Fair in Barcelona and afterwards relocated to the bodegas at Haro in Rioja. In time the pavilion would be superseded by a new extension of cultural buildings. As such it was a stepping-stone, a bridge between the past, present and future development of the bodega.

For us the starting point was to jump into the future to determine how the present would evolve. We began this project by a series of studies exploring how the bodegas could evolve. Working backwards from these studies the pavilion began to emerge in tandem.

The pavilion would house the past, the old pavilion. Made from timber and designed in a fin de siecle style the old pavilion became a jewel within a new container. Like a series of Russian dolls the new pavilion itself was to be eventually housed within the new extension at the bodegas. The new pavilion would be just one layer in a larger composition.

Proceeding with this almost onion analogy, various studies led to a container developed in sectional cuts. The section distorts from a rectangle around the old pavilion to a distorted memory shape resembling a decanter. Which was not an intentional end point but once noticed it could not be ignored that we had designed a new bottle for an old wine.