One September a decade ago, I was in Spain on a tour with a couple of airline pilots, one of whom put new meaning in the airline phrase “hop,” when he brought back enough kangaroo meat back from Australia to feed 200 people. We were in a wonderful old bar called El Suizo in Haro, the capital of the Rioja Alta, getting ready to wind down the evening, when I spied several brands of Sherry brandies behind the bar.
“Have you guys ever tried one of those wonderful old sherry brandies, a Solera Gran Reserva?” I asked.
“No, but I sure would like to,” came the reply from Jim Wiltjer, a former Delta Airlines pilot, who is ever game to try a new wine or a local delicacy.
I asked the bartender to pour a snifter each of Cardenal Mendoza, the dark rich, silky brandy from Sanchez Romate, and the equally rich and smooth Gran Duque de Alba, once the star of Diez-Merito’s stable and now owned by Williams and Humbert of Dry Sack fame. Now, in Spain, they never short the faithful when it comes to brandy, so Wiltjer and his sidekick, Bill Charney from Reno, Nevada were regaled with a good three fingers of dark, plummy brandy. No one can ever accuse Spanish bartenders shorting on brandy pours.
I soon drifted off to our Hotel, Los Agustinos, which is housed in a lovely 600-year old Augustinian convent, and left Wiltjer and Charney savoring their brandies and rehashing events of a more recent nature, no doubt, their years as fighter pilots in Vietnam and the four-day retirement bash Charney threw in Reno for over 200 people, an incredible event that saw the consumption of Charney’s friend Brice Jones’s wine, Sonoma-Cutrer, measured in gallons.
Of their conversation, Wiltjer and Charney said little, but they were effusive in their praise of those two silky Spanish brandies, as most people are when they taste the slightly sweet, aterciopelado (velvety) tones of these high-quality user-friendly Solera Gran Reserva brandies that are so different from the drier, more biting, often harsh finishes of Cognac and Armagnac.
Spaniards are the largest producers of brandy in the world. They also consume vast quantities of it in Spain (approximately 10,000,000 cases) and ship millions of bottles more to Latin America, Europe, the United States and around the world. Spaniards are probably the most experienced spirits producers in the world, since the ostensibly abstemious Moors, who discovered alcohol (a Moorish word, as is alambique [alambic]), occupied parts of the Iberian Peninsula from the early 8th to the 16th century. Ironically, the turban-like still-head where the vapors collect and the French call chapiteau, is known in Spain as the cabeza de moro (Moor’s head) and they still use a Moorish name, alquitara, for the discontinuous pot still and the high-quality spirit it produces for premium brandies. A famous Catalan-Valencian doctor, Arnau de Vilanova, who was an advisor to Pope Clement V, is said to have produced the first aguardiente (literally, firewater) or marc in the 12th century for medicinal purposes.
Most of Spain’s brandy distillers are the huge Sherry producers of Jerez - - Domecq, Gonzalez-Byass, Williams and Humbert, Osborne - - who distill their base brandies from high alcohol wines made from the non-descript Airén, Cayetana, and Jaen grapes grown in the hot, dry areas of La Mancha and Extremadura. Very little brandy is made from the sherry district’s prized Palomino grape. And most of the distilling is done in the Manchegan town of Tomelloso, in the heart of Don Quixote country, and in Almendralejo, an Extremaduran town that sits in a sea of good-mostly-for-brandy vineyards, where single and double distillation is carried out in pot stills, but, for the more common types of brandies, by continuous distillation in massive stills. For Solera Gran Reserva brandies, however are usually the product of single distillation in alquitara pot stills, often up to 100% alquitara distillates.
The best Jerez solera brandies are made from up to 80% holandas spirits, the core of wines distilled at low temperatures that reach only 60-70% alcohol and retain most of the wine’s flavoring component. The name holandas is derived from the spirits left over from a refused Domecq shipment originally consigned to a Amsterdam purveyor. When the Dutch canceled the order due to late delivery, Domecq was left with a considerable quantity of high quality grape spirits residing in oak casks, where it remained for several years. By the time Pedro Domecq got around to tasting the stuff, it had turned into a quality brandy and the famous brand, Fundador, was born.
Besides the selection process, which divides the brandies into three different qualities depending on the quality of the spirits distilled and how long they destined to be aged, it is the method of ageing in the Sherry bodegas of Jerez that further distinguishes Brandies de Jerez from their competitors. The raw brandies obtained from the alquitaras are blended, transported to the Sherry district, and aged for a short period in small oak casks, before being reduced in alcoholic strength by the addition of distilled water. The brandy is then transferred to 500-600 liter butts in a brandy solera system, which operates like the tiered system used to make sherry.
The brandy will pass through several scales (from five to fourteen rows of barrels), or criaderas, during what is sometimes referred to as a dynamic, rather than, static ageing process. By moving the spirits several times in the space of a few years, the spirits are exposed to air and soften up much earlier than cognacs or armagnacs. The brandies also take on the characteristics of the brandies that already reside in the solera and the flavors imparted by the sherry casks they are being aged in: used fino, amontillado, dry oloroso, or Pedro Ximenez casks.
Brandies de Jerez, the Sherry brandies, are classified into three different quality categories: Solera Brandy de Jerez, usually the lower end brandies such as Fundador aged for just six months by law, but usually one year in practice; Reserva Brandy de Jerez, the good solid middle range of brandies such as Osborne’s superb Magno, by law aged for a minimum of one year, but usually an average of two and a half years; and Solera Gran Reserva Brandy de Jerez, top of the line brandies that must be aged a minimum of three years, but in reality are usually aged eight to twelve years.
Besides the Solera Gran Reserva Brandies de Jerez, Larios, the gin producers in Malaga, produce a superb Jerez style brandy called Larios 1966 and the Catalan firms, Miguel Torres and Mascaró, produce several truly exceptional Charentais-method cognac style brandies. Many Jerez bodegas produces Solera Gran Reserva brandies, but only five are readily available in most American markets: Conde de Osborne, Lepanto, Carlos I, Cardenal Mendoza, and Gran Duque de Alba, so I have chosen to focus my tasting notes on them. I used a top quality cognac from A. De Fussigny and one of Francis Darroze superb armagnacs as spirits to measure the Spanish brandies against.
Tasting Notes:
Control brandies
A. De Fussigny X.O Lot 99 Cognac
Pale, correct, light amber. Gorgeous, fruity, peach nose with light caramel tones. Smooth, glossy, finishes with fruity, hot spirit finish lingers. 90-92 pts.
Francis Darroze Bas Armagnac Series Rare 1965 (Aged 28 yrs. in wood.)
Pale, light tea-colored. More sauvage nose, fiery animal nose, age, wood, depth, complexity, intriguing. Light, ethereal, melts in the mouth, then leaves a trail of fiery, nervy Armagnac sparks as it goes down. 95-96 pts.
Brandies de Jerez - Solera Gran Reserva
Conde de Osborne, Osborne Puerto de Santa María
Average age of 20 years from soleras up to 100 years old. Salvador Dalí-designed bottle makes a distinctive gift.
Pale, amber, hazelnut color. Simple nose, lightly sweet, whiffs of raisins, butterscotch, nuts, floral notes. Light, smooth, glossy, bitter finish of hazelnut husk, but not the fiery bite of cognac or armagnac. I am a great admirer of Osborne’s Rare Sherries and their superb middle-range Brandy de Jerez, the great, best selling Magno, but I have always been more impressed by the Dalí bottle than I have the brandy. 85 pts.
Lepanto, Gonzalez Byass Jerez de la Frontera
Average age 15-20 years. The attractive decanter package with glass stopper is a terrific gift package.
Very pale, blond wood/palo cortado color. Clean pretty, nutty, almond-hazelnut, amontillado sherry-barrel nose with hints of apricot. Very ethereal, light, smooth with a bitter finish. Nice balance between cognac and brandy de Jerez, on the drier, more elegant side, but not very complex or intense flavors. 88 pts.
Carlos I (Primero), Pedro Domecq Jerez de la Frontera
Average age 12 years. (Carlos I Imperial, a super expensive brandy, supposedly a cut above Carlos I comes in a crystal decanter; the Carlos I package is rather ordinary). Light aged amontillado-palo cortado color. Simple, light nutty sherry nose, some grapiness. Smooth, glossy without being sweet, tones of vanilla and sweet spices, again a balance between sherry brandy and cognac. Mostly wood in the finish. 86 pts.
Cardenal Mendoza, Sanchez Romate Jerez de la Frontera
Average age 15 years. Has an attractive, old style gilded label and comes in an attractive cork box, which makes a great gift. Darker, light mahogany/cream sherry color, high viscosity.. Nice nose with grape aromas at the core, with whiffs of nuts, dried fruits, sherry, wood, some animal elements reminiscent of the Armagnac. Exceptionally smooth and silky on the palate with coffee and dried fruits flavors and a soft, lingering finish. 92-93 pts.
Gran Duque de Alba, Williams & Humbert Jerez de la Frontera
Aged three years in barrels used to age Pedro Ximenez and Oloroso. Attractive squat bottle with a wax seal and romantic, old-style label featuring the Duke of Alba. The average age for this Solera Gran Reserva is around 10 years. Medium brown oloroso color, high viscosity. Prettiest nose of the Spanish brandies, fruity, tropical flowers, clean, with hints of peaches, orange peel, butterscotch, and oloroso aromas. Very smooth, soft, round with flavors of sweetened oloroso. Sumptuous, luxurious, but with a dry woody finish. 92-93 pts.
Gerry Dawes©2009
gerrydawes@aol.com
Literary Inspiration for A Traveller in Wines
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Introduction to A Traveller in Wines
From the writings on Spain of Alexandre Dumas père; the English Murray Guides writer, Richard Ford; and the late Americans, James A. Michener, and Donn Pohren, a little-known, but important, American expert on things Spanish, I learned to approach Spain and its wines, food, history, and culture with an adventurous and inquisitive spirit.
In 1972, Pohren, who has lived in Spain for decades and is one of the world’s greatest flamenco experts, published his idiosyncratic underground classic, Adventures in Taste: The Wines and Folk Food of Spain. Pohren wandered around the Iberian Peninsula exploring some of Spain's 4,000,000 acres of vineyard lands, the largest wine acreage of any country in the world, and tasting wines. He would pop into a village bar, ask for a glass of the local vino, then casually ask who made the best wine in town. On several occasions, Pohren would find himself being offered several samples as one vintner after another showed up at the bar with his wines to prove to this foreigner that his vino was the best in the village.
In Adventures in Taste, Pohren described encounter after encounter with artisan winemakers who were making good country wines, many of which were unknown to the outside world in those days. Although Pohren was relatively unsophisticated as a gourmet, he chronicled his food adventures as well, ferreting out great regional restaurants, back-country inns and taverns, and tapas bars all over the country. He wrote about the best places for great roast lamb in Castile; the superb mountain hams from acorn-fed, free-range Iberian pata negra pigs of southern and western Spain; great fish and shellfish along both the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts; garlic chicken in Madrid; and such esoteric specialties as baby goat livers in lemon sauce in the mountains of Malaga, and. Pohren not only wrote about the food, wine, customs, and fiestas, each year he ran several specialized tours, in which he introduced a handful of privileged travellers to his secret places in back country Spain.
During the eight years I lived in Spain, I traveled with Pohren’s book and with James A. Michener’s Iberia (my copy of Iberia is signed by more than 20 of the characters about which Michener wrote). I often drove many kilometers out of my way to find Pohren’s culinary and wine treasures and to search out the people and places about which Michener had so persuasively written. While following in the footsteps of these predecessors, I naturally had my own adventures. I began to uncover exceptional wines, experience my own unique gastronomic epiphanies, meet unforgettable people, and discover places about which neither Michener nor Pohren had written.
The writings of Richard Ford, an Englishman, who covered much of Spain on horseback during the 1840s also inspired me. Ford wrote one of the most well-written and witty travel guides I have ever read, A Handbook for Travellers in Spain and Readers at Home (ironically republished by my home university’s Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois; ©Centaur Press, Ltd. 1966). Ford’s frontispiece further billed the book as “Describing the Country and Cities, the Natives and Their Manners; The Antiquities, Religion, Legends, Fine Arts, Literature, Sports, and Gastronomy with notices On Spanish History.”
Ford described his travels in Spain pithily, provided his readers with often humorous insights about Spaniards, many of which still hold true, and imbued his writing with a sense of adventure that has long inspired me to continue embarking on what he called, “those wild and weary rides through tawny Spain.”
Wine and food are the threads that will bind the tapestry of A Traveller in Wines: Forty Years of Adventures on the Food & Wine Roads of Spain, but I intend for the book to have a much broader appeal. Although I plan to concentrate on wine and gastronomy adventures, like Ford, Michener, and Pohren, I will draw from the broader spectrum of Spain’s rich heritage, history, and culture to make A Traveller in Wines a great read about the country, its people (and, like Michener, sometimes the foreigners who love it), its vineyards and wineries, its tapas bars and restaurants, and its winemakers and chefs.
I am fond of quoting two passages about Spain—one from Richard Ford and the other from Alexandre Dumas père—which are in the spirit of the approach I want to bring to my book. Ford’s passage is about the philosophy of travel and life; Dumas’s is evocative description.
In A Handbook for Travellers in Spain, Ford wrote his philosophy on traveling in Spain: “The search for the excellent is the high road to excellence . . . The refining effort and habit teaches the mind to think; from long pondering the beautiful world without, snatches are caught of the beautiful world within, and a glimpse is granted to the chosen few, of glories hidden from the vulgar many. They indeed have eyes, but see not . . .” It will be my task in A Traveller in Wines to share those glimpses with those who may not have been able to see Spain for themselves and provide deeper insights for those who have been to Spain.
Alexandre Dumas wrote some fine descriptive passages about his travels in Spain in From Paris to Cadiz, including this quote, which is one of my favorites, “People talk of the glorious dreams of opium-smokers, the frenzied exhilaration that hashish can give, but I, who have studied both, assure you that neither can for a moment compare with the delirious joy of fifty or sixty Spaniards applauding a dancer in the upper room of a café in Seville!” Dumas’s quote alludes to the duende that Lorca wrote about, a magical quality in the Spanish spirit that I have been lucky enough to encounter in my travels.
Gerry Dawes©2008
gerrydawes@aol.com
In 1972, Pohren, who has lived in Spain for decades and is one of the world’s greatest flamenco experts, published his idiosyncratic underground classic, Adventures in Taste: The Wines and Folk Food of Spain. Pohren wandered around the Iberian Peninsula exploring some of Spain's 4,000,000 acres of vineyard lands, the largest wine acreage of any country in the world, and tasting wines. He would pop into a village bar, ask for a glass of the local vino, then casually ask who made the best wine in town. On several occasions, Pohren would find himself being offered several samples as one vintner after another showed up at the bar with his wines to prove to this foreigner that his vino was the best in the village.
In Adventures in Taste, Pohren described encounter after encounter with artisan winemakers who were making good country wines, many of which were unknown to the outside world in those days. Although Pohren was relatively unsophisticated as a gourmet, he chronicled his food adventures as well, ferreting out great regional restaurants, back-country inns and taverns, and tapas bars all over the country. He wrote about the best places for great roast lamb in Castile; the superb mountain hams from acorn-fed, free-range Iberian pata negra pigs of southern and western Spain; great fish and shellfish along both the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts; garlic chicken in Madrid; and such esoteric specialties as baby goat livers in lemon sauce in the mountains of Malaga, and. Pohren not only wrote about the food, wine, customs, and fiestas, each year he ran several specialized tours, in which he introduced a handful of privileged travellers to his secret places in back country Spain.
During the eight years I lived in Spain, I traveled with Pohren’s book and with James A. Michener’s Iberia (my copy of Iberia is signed by more than 20 of the characters about which Michener wrote). I often drove many kilometers out of my way to find Pohren’s culinary and wine treasures and to search out the people and places about which Michener had so persuasively written. While following in the footsteps of these predecessors, I naturally had my own adventures. I began to uncover exceptional wines, experience my own unique gastronomic epiphanies, meet unforgettable people, and discover places about which neither Michener nor Pohren had written.
The writings of Richard Ford, an Englishman, who covered much of Spain on horseback during the 1840s also inspired me. Ford wrote one of the most well-written and witty travel guides I have ever read, A Handbook for Travellers in Spain and Readers at Home (ironically republished by my home university’s Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois; ©Centaur Press, Ltd. 1966). Ford’s frontispiece further billed the book as “Describing the Country and Cities, the Natives and Their Manners; The Antiquities, Religion, Legends, Fine Arts, Literature, Sports, and Gastronomy with notices On Spanish History.”
Ford described his travels in Spain pithily, provided his readers with often humorous insights about Spaniards, many of which still hold true, and imbued his writing with a sense of adventure that has long inspired me to continue embarking on what he called, “those wild and weary rides through tawny Spain.”
Wine and food are the threads that will bind the tapestry of A Traveller in Wines: Forty Years of Adventures on the Food & Wine Roads of Spain, but I intend for the book to have a much broader appeal. Although I plan to concentrate on wine and gastronomy adventures, like Ford, Michener, and Pohren, I will draw from the broader spectrum of Spain’s rich heritage, history, and culture to make A Traveller in Wines a great read about the country, its people (and, like Michener, sometimes the foreigners who love it), its vineyards and wineries, its tapas bars and restaurants, and its winemakers and chefs.
I am fond of quoting two passages about Spain—one from Richard Ford and the other from Alexandre Dumas père—which are in the spirit of the approach I want to bring to my book. Ford’s passage is about the philosophy of travel and life; Dumas’s is evocative description.
In A Handbook for Travellers in Spain, Ford wrote his philosophy on traveling in Spain: “The search for the excellent is the high road to excellence . . . The refining effort and habit teaches the mind to think; from long pondering the beautiful world without, snatches are caught of the beautiful world within, and a glimpse is granted to the chosen few, of glories hidden from the vulgar many. They indeed have eyes, but see not . . .” It will be my task in A Traveller in Wines to share those glimpses with those who may not have been able to see Spain for themselves and provide deeper insights for those who have been to Spain.
Alexandre Dumas wrote some fine descriptive passages about his travels in Spain in From Paris to Cadiz, including this quote, which is one of my favorites, “People talk of the glorious dreams of opium-smokers, the frenzied exhilaration that hashish can give, but I, who have studied both, assure you that neither can for a moment compare with the delirious joy of fifty or sixty Spaniards applauding a dancer in the upper room of a café in Seville!” Dumas’s quote alludes to the duende that Lorca wrote about, a magical quality in the Spanish spirit that I have been lucky enough to encounter in my travels.
Gerry Dawes©2008
gerrydawes@aol.com
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Roda & Contino - Rioja's Two-part Harmony
Agustín Santolaya, Managing Director of Roda & Jesús Madrazo, Winemaker, Contino pour each other's wines at Hector Oribe Restaurant in La Rioja.Roda & Contino - Rioja's Two-part Harmony
Text & Photographs by Gerry Dawes, copyright 2006
For at least a decade or more, I have had a love-hate relationship with the wines of Rioja - a region responsible for some of my life's most memorable tasting experiences. I prized the best of the old guard wines (R. López de Heredia, CVNE, La Rioja Alta, Marqués de Riscal and others) - yet recognized the mediocrity of many - and grated against the brashness of a gush of new wave Riojas that left palate-scalding new oak and high alcohol in their wake. Not surprisingly, the passage of time has seen most of the stalwarts evolving toward a more modern style and many of the newcomers toning down their brash styles to a degree that moves them closer to the classic wines that made Rioja famous in the first place. Among the most captivating of these maverick makers, Viñedos del Contino has emerged as Spain's most important "château" and Bodegas Roda as one of its most significant and innovative wineries founded in the past 25 years. Both are now at or near the top of almost everyone's list of the greatest wines of the modern Spanish era, including mine. And because each has accrued substantial track records - Contino with more than 30 vintages, Roda with more than 15 - the time is ripe to reassess their evolutions.
Contino Estate, La Rioja AlavesaLocated in La Rioja Alavesa district, a few miles northwest of Logroño, La Rioja's provincial capital, Contino is a single-vineyard pago that produces a reserva and gran reserva, the unusual varietal Graciano and the stunning single-parcel wine, El Olivo. Roda, a state-of-the-art winery that also embraces some notable, time-honored influences, is located next door to R. López de Heredia's centenarian bodegas in the celebrated Barrio de la Estación in Haro. Roda makes the entry-level Roda (formerly Roda II), Roda I (the bodega's flagship 100 percent Tempranillo) and the super-luxury cuvée, Cirsion (named for the thistle blossom that is the winery's logo).
Agustín Santolaya pouring for the late night tasting at Roda.The genesis for this article actually came about three springs ago at the Salón Internacional de Gourmets in Madrid when Agustín Santolaya, the tall, handsome, affable general manager of Roda, made me an offer I couldn't refuse: "Come up to the winery in La Rioja after the Salón closes and I will open every wine we have made since 1992 and prove to you how great Roda wines really are." Two years prior, I had questioned his approach to winemaking in print and he was eager to gently but firmly defend Roda's prominently proclaimed scientific approach to viticultural techniques and winemaking, and prove me wrong in the process.
See The Wine News for the full story: www.thewinenews.com/aprmay06/feat.asp
Historic Tasting at Contino
Contino's now famous El Olivo vineyard. Gerry Dawes©2008
gerrydawes@aol.com
Rioja Vignette: Lunch and a Thunderstorm in La Rioja Alavesa
* * * * *
On a warm sunny June day in the Basque Country, I drove down from Bilbao to Laguardia in La Rioja Alavesa for what promised to be a very special afternoon. Along with some 300 people, including local dignitaries, the Spanish national press, and a group of top Spanish and foreign wine writers and tasters, I had been invited to attend the unveiling of the maqueta (model) for Frank Gehry’s newest project in Spain, a multi-use building at Bodegas Marqués de Riscal, La Rioja’s oldest winery, which is located in the sleepy little Rioja Alavesa wine village of Elciego. Marqués de Riscal contracted Frank O. Gehry & Associates to build a shining futuristic hotel building on a grassy plot above the cluster of old winery buildings, some of which date from 1860. Riscal wanted a building that, according to winery sources, "breaks drastically with the image of the traditional Rioja cellar." The wine professionals were also invited to arrive at 5 p.m. to taste some stunning old wines from Marqués de Riscal’s cellars going back to 1871.
Paco Hurtado, Technical Director of Marqués de Riscal, opening a 1945 Reserva at one of the events surrounding the unveiling of Frank Gehry's plans for Riscal's futuristic hotel.
On the way down to Riscal, I had lunch at Castillo el Colmado, a refurbished 1920s mansion situated on an esplanade along the northeastern edge of Laguardia, the dramatically-situated walled town that is to La Rioja what Riquewihr is to Alsace, Châteaunuef-du-Pape is to the Rhône. For Javier Arcillona, the tall, gaunt, very serious man who owns this charming, hotel-cum-restaurant, being a hotelier is a dream come true and he takes his mission seriously, attending to each table by advising guests of the daily specials, explaining dishes, and taking the orders himself. My luncheon companion was an old friend and fellow americano Thomas Perry, who is the Director of the Grupo de Exportadores de Vinos de La Rioja.
First, Sr. Arcillona sent out tapas of deep-fried, cured-ham croquetas, then a degustación of chef Manuel Rementería’s specialties. The procession of dishes included buttery, house-made pate de foie-gras; a typical Basque dish, revueltos con perritxos (scrambled eggs with prized spring mushrooms); braised pimientos de piquillo (the superb triangular-shaped red peppers of southern Rioja and Navarra); pencas de acelgas con crema (chard stalks in a creamy sauce); hojaldre de mejillones con salsa de erizos (mussels in puff pastry with a sea urchin sauce); and rich mushroom-filled crêpes. The ripe, juicy, Bordeaux-esque Dominio de Conte Reserva 1996 drank very well with these dishes and with my main course, a delicious, tender cabrito asado (roast suckling goat) with roasted potatoes.
While we were having lunch, a big thunderstorm swept along the northern rim of the Sierra de Cantabrica, the steep blue-gray wall that protects the Rioja from some of the fiercer winter storms from the wild Bay of Biscay, an hour to the north. There were huge black clouds with lightning and, probably somewhere over the vineyards of the surrounding La Rioja Alavesa (Basque Rioja), there could have been a hailstorm. At the very least the pelting rain could be wreaking havoc with the just-set flowering of the vines.
Contino Estate
Contino
Once, in late 1970s, I was visiting Contino estate in La Rioja in early July, when a ferocious storm hit, dumping tons of mothball-sized hail on the vineyards. The hail wiped out 65% of the Viñedos de Contino’s crop that year. There was so many hailstones that Basilio Izquierdo, the then winemaker at CUNE (who also owns Contino), and I used a pile of them to ice down a bottle of manzanilla that I had brought from Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Andalucía’s Sherry country. Here, in La Rioja, as in Burgundy and other regions at the limits of cultivation, nature threatens the vineyards, but it also blesses them with one of best climates on earth for making great wines.
Gerry Dawes©2008
gerrydawes@aol.com
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Heavenly Nights in Old Castile: Adventures with Ambrosio Molinos
* * * * *
Unlike many Spanish cities and coastal resort areas, which have lost much of their unique Spanish flavor to modern developers, the back country towns of the Duero River valley and the upland region of Burgos province known as the Cradle of Castile still smack of old Spain, the Castilian Spain of evocative landscapes, ancient castles, old monasteries, and brick baker’s ovens redolent of lambs roasting. For a period of almost ten years, when I was exploring the Ribera del Duero to write about its unique local wines, a few of which can hold their own with the world's finest, I came to know the area as well as any place in Spain.
Early on during my travels in the Ribera del Duero, I met Ambrosio Molinos, an aficionado of great regional food, a gourmand of repute, and one of the great artisan cheese makers of Castile. He, his wife Asunción, and their three children lived in Roa de Duero, a village with a rocky history, which stands on a high cliff overlooking the Duero.
It was the Pérez Pascuas brothers, the exceptional wine making family of the nearby village of Pedrosa, who introduced me to the stout, jovial Ambrosio, who came over to Pedrosa to eat wild boar with us and brought his guitar and one of his wonderful Burgos cheeses with him. Ambrosio has a quick and easy laugh, an incredible sense of humor, and always seemed to be in good spirits. We soon become fast friends because of a common interest in wine, regional cuisine, and his penchant for scandalous jokes. He began to join me on my explorations of the Ribera del Duero, sometimes driving me in his Land Rover, sometimes guiding me, often following, as I introduced him to things and people in his home region that even he didn’t know. Except for my propensity to gain weight when I spent time in the company of him and his robust appetite, I suppose I could travel with him for weeks on end, for I have know few more amiable companions.
Ambrosio loves to eat as much as anyone I have ever met. He relishes the intellectual aspects of gastronomy as well and can talk for hours about the art of eating, then on occasion after dinner, can spend another hilarious hour on the scatological joys of eliminating what he eats. He is a hefty man. One hot summer day, when I stopped by his home in Roa on a surprise visit when I was following Fran Rivera around Spain with a New York-based writer,I encountered Ambrosio shirtless, having a casual lunch with his family. When I kidded him about putting on weight, he clutched a roll of fat at his midsection, and told me, "That’s not me, that’s my shirt."
On several occasions, Ambrosio Molinos had told me about the Colegiata of Covarrubias and its famous polychrome wood triptych of the Epiphany, but on previous trips, it had been closed when I arrived, so this June day, I made arrangements to meet Ambrosio for lunch at a new Covarrubias restaurant, De Galo, and visit the Colegiata after lunch. It was to be another memorable day in Castile.
I arrived at a small parking area just outside the 16th-century gate that is the northern entrance to town just as Ambrosio was arriving in his Land Rover. As usual, we were both hungry, so lunch was the first order of business. It was three p.m., a civilized hour for two old friends and aficionados of good food to begin a serious lunch. However, on past trips, I had had little luck with the food in Covarrubias. I had distinctly bad memories from my first encounter years ago at the Parador de Arlanza across the Plaza Do a Urraca and the other restaurant on the square, Galín, was known for its middling comida casera ("home cooked" food), including olla podrida, literally, rotten pot stew, an undeservedly famous Castilian dish that Ambrosio had introduced me to a couple of years earlier.
One day over lunch at Julián de Tolosa, a trencherman’s Basque restaurant in Madrid, Ambrosio carefully related the recipe for a great rotten pot stew into my tape recorder, thus preserving for posterity the secret Castilian formula for mainlining pork: "First, an olla podrida should be made with alubias de Ibeas, the little black-red beans that come from around the village of Ibeas east of Burgos and are the best beans in Spain. That is most important. Then, in a clay stove top casserole, you slowly cook the beans with a special adobado (marinaded) pig foot, a marinaded pig’s ear, and pork ribs. The adobo marinade is made with salted water, to which orégano is added or, depending on the area, other spices such as black pepper, bay leaves, and paprika, sometimes even piquant paprika. The marinade, which gives the olla podrida its strong flavor, also preserves the meat, so it can be left all season in a cool place such as a basement or a cave. Then you put in some fatty chorizo, the one they call botage o, because it has a higher percentage of fat to lean, and some morcilla, blood sausage."
But, there is more. Ambrosio continued, " Once the olla podrida is cooked, you make what we call bolas, made from toasted hard bread that is then mixed some of the pork fat from the stew to make "balls," which are then fried and served on a platter alongside the olla. The meat that was cooked with the beans is served on a separate platter, the beans are also served on a separate dish, and guindillas, pickled onions and other pickled vegetables are served as a garnish. Then all you need is a big appetite." He then recommended a scandalous precaution, not to be repeated here, for the flatulence he said was sure to ensue from eating rotten pot stew.
I had gone with Ambrosio to one of these olla podrida pig-outs near Ibeas and he also had offered to take me to mother of all pig festivals at the Virrey Palafox restaurant in El Burgo de Osma in the neighboring province of Soria, where they have multi-course pig meals in February to celebrate the winter hog slaughter. But now, my concern was for Restaurante De Galo, whose chef-owner was the son of the owners of Galín, who were proud of their olla podrida. Just thinking about rotten pot stew conjured up visions of thousands of tiny porkers lumbering through my arteries in pursuit of the Pig Olympics gold medal for cardiac arrest.
Fortunately, De Galo turned out to be one of those great culinary surprises that can not only make your day, they can make your week and provoke future gastronomic pilgrimages. The restaurant was just inside the main village gateway, so we went straight in. Not only were we to have a great meal, I was introduced to another of the mysteries of Castile, one as basic to the human condition as food itself, but unique to this region and utterly fascinating. Inside the restaurant, in an ante room, was a cocina serrana, a "kitchen of the sierra," specifically the Sierra de la Demanda.
Inside what was essentially a large chimney that tapered gradually to a small opening at the top was a large hearth, surrounding on three sides by benches, where the mountain people could sit on cold winter evenings as stew pots bubbled away, keeping warm, having communal meals, and, no doubt, tertulias, or gab fests, of legendary import, almost certainly repeating the great oral histories of the region. These cocinas serranas are as snug as a teepee and once I had seen one, I was immediately reminded of the pre-television days of my youth in my Illinois village when the communal joys of family and friends were everything. (In the Hotel Arlanza, there is another cocina serrana, this one now a part of the hotel bar and with a television installed. Somehow, it does not have quite the same charm as the one in Restaurante De Galo.)
Our meal was as memorable as the cocina serrana. This man Galo could cook. We began by splitting a whole besugo escabechado, a sea bream marinated in an escabeche sauce and served cold. We mopped up the sauce with good coarse Castilian bread. Then came a local specialty that I seldom pass up when I see it on a Burgos-area menu, those alubias rojas de Ibeas that Ambrosio talked about. These were cooked with chorizo, served with grilled morcilla, and guindillas, the slender yellow-green piquant peppers that are a Basque specialty without which one, especially this one, does not consume his beans. The main course was vine-grilled baby lamb chops (served here with the kidneys), roasted potatoes, and what in recent years has become an indispensable side dish with roasted or grilled meats, delicious pimientos de piquillo, the sometimes slightly spicy little red peppers that are one of the great delicacies of Spain. We washed this repast down with a delicious, inexpensive Covarrubias wine from Ribera de Arlanza, a growing region that was on the verge of disappearing just a few years ago. Similar to a Ribera del Duero wine, but lighter and fresher, this Vi a Valdable, was not only perfect with the food, it cost less than the equivalent of $7. A café con leche, a delicious limited production Baines Pacharán from Navarra, and a Montecristo cigar were dessert, after which we would waddle off in the direction of the Colegiata.
Over the years, Ambrosio and I developed a running gastronomic joke. First, in the morning, we claim to just about anyone who will listen, we have some breakfast, at which we discuss where to make our first stop for tapas, where we plot where to stop for the merienda (a kind of in-between-meals snack). After the merienda, it goes without saying that we need another tapa before lunch. After lunch, another tapas opportunity is in order, so we can discuss where we are going for the afternoon merienda, pre-dinner tapas, and then dinner, nothing too heavy, of course. Then there is the tough decision about where to have after-dinner drinks and cigars.
It is mid summer and I am with Ambrosio and his family on a path half way up the hill that rises above Ambrosio’s hometown of Guzmán, a small village located at the western edge of Burgos province just a few kilometers from Roa in what used to be known as Old Castile. At ten in the evening, the sun has just gone down over the páramo, the great stark Castilian plateau, which so captivated the imaginations of such writers as Antonio Machado and Miguel Delibes.
The páramo, like the large herds of sheep which graze these ancient hills, has recently been shorn of its cover. Gone are the infinite rows of ripening wheat that wave seductively over these hills earlier in the summer; now the fields are uniformly close-cropped and lay in the soft evening light looking like large tawny lions. From here, I can see a vast section of the great wine-growing Duero river valley and, in the distance, more hills where the last rays of the sun bathe the occasional hill top village with a rich golden light.
The hill behind me is honeycombed with family-owned wine and cheese caves, cool manmade caverns which were already centuries-old when Columbus discovered America. In a little stone shed built into the hill, Ambrosio and Asunción, are laying out the fixings for a simple, but first-rate and unforgettable dinner: a salad of garden-picked lettuce, perfectly ripened flavorful tomatoes, and sweet Spanish onions; wedges of Ambrosio’s superb Burgos sheep’s milk queso Castellano, a delicious, slightly sharp, white cheese; round, thin slices of home-cured country chorizo; chuletillas (milk-fed lamb chops), and red cherries picked from a villager’s trees. The meal will be accompanied by the rustic, but delicious, country wine which Ambrosio and his father buy from the cooperative in the neighboring village of Quintanamanvirgo, then age in large old barrels down in the cave next door. Ambrosio ages cheeses in his cave.
Soon we descend into the pitch dark depths of the wine cave, lighting our way by candles. The bodega, as a wine cellar is called in Spain, is perfectly cool and properly humid for ageing wine. It is rustic, old, full of atmosphere. There are cobwebs, mold, 16-liter bulbous glass garrafas with cork stoppers, a modest stash of bottled wines, a couple of smaller barrels, and a large cuba barrel, where last year’s harvest of wine is gaining character. Using a siphon, Ambrosio draws a good measure of dark red Ribera del Duero wine into a porrón, a beaker-like pitcher with a neck for putting wine in and with a long needle-nosed spout. The spout facilitates sanitary communal drinking for those who have mastered its use and wine-stained shirts or blouses and good-natured expletives from those who haven’t.
Part of the ritual demands that we sample the wine from porrón down in the cave. Ambrosio lifts the beaker by its glass neck and places the tip of the spout just inside his open mouth without letting it touch his lips or tongue. He elevates the bottom of the beaker and a thin stream of wine flows out. Once the flow begins, Ambrosio gradually extends the porrón to arm’s length taking the wine into his mouth in an arching stream that flashes ruby in the flickering candle light. Watching someone drink from a porrón in one of these wine caves is spectacular, beautiful, folkloric. There is almost a religious quality to this rite, a discernible atavistic pull that binds those who share from this vessel. This wine bonding, camaraderie in a jug, is the stuff of vintage nostalgia.
After a couple of more rounds, we draw more wine to top up the porrón and climb the hand-hewn steps out of the cave into the fresh evening air. Around us, other villagers are also preparing al fresco dinners in their own hillside merenderos, as they call these little huts, few of which are anything more than a cave anteroom with a stone table in front.
One of Ambrosio’s friends from the village has brought up a bundle of grape vine cuttings, which he sets alight on the ground in front of a rough masonry retainer wall. A blaze roars several feet above the bundle. I photograph this culinary pyre with the tower of the village’s 16th-century church, the rust-red, tejas-tiled roofs, and the lovely pastel vestiges of the glorious sunset as a backdrop. While the flame is blazing itself out, leaving only squiggly, glowing vine embers that are perhaps the perfect fire for cooking chuletillas, Ambrosio loads a hinged grill with two dozen little lamb chops. The grill has handles so that the whole device can be flipped over to finish cooking the other side.
While the chuletillas are roasting, we pass around the porrón and Ambrosio starts telling us about his 70 year-old father’s wine drinking habits. Ambrosio claims, that his father--the late Ambrosio padre--in his youth, drank three to four liters of wine per day. Some field workers drank six, he says. He calculates that his father has drunk some 85,000 liters of wine in his life. "Tres camiones cisternas--three tank trucks full," he figures.
"His front tooth has a groove in it - - like limestone which water has dripped on for years - - where the stream of wine from the porrón hits it. When he had a stomach operation last year, the doctor told him he could only have one glass of wine per day, so he bought a very large glass. He refuses to drink water in months which have ‘r’ in them, so he still drinks a liter of wine a day."
Ambrosio’s hilarious account of his father’s love of wine is just the beginning. The smell of the fire-roasted lamb is irresistible and the cool wine flows freely, calling for another descent or two into the cave. We eat, drink, laugh, and talk until midnight. Out here in the Castilian countryside, the sky is a celestial canopy blazing with thousands of bright stars that seem to be hovering just above our heads. Finally, the cool air coaxes us down to the village bar for a café con leche and a brandy.
These are heavenly nights on the páramo of Castile.
Gerry Dawes©2008
gerrydawes@aol.com
Early on during my travels in the Ribera del Duero, I met Ambrosio Molinos, an aficionado of great regional food, a gourmand of repute, and one of the great artisan cheese makers of Castile. He, his wife Asunción, and their three children lived in Roa de Duero, a village with a rocky history, which stands on a high cliff overlooking the Duero.
It was the Pérez Pascuas brothers, the exceptional wine making family of the nearby village of Pedrosa, who introduced me to the stout, jovial Ambrosio, who came over to Pedrosa to eat wild boar with us and brought his guitar and one of his wonderful Burgos cheeses with him. Ambrosio has a quick and easy laugh, an incredible sense of humor, and always seemed to be in good spirits. We soon become fast friends because of a common interest in wine, regional cuisine, and his penchant for scandalous jokes. He began to join me on my explorations of the Ribera del Duero, sometimes driving me in his Land Rover, sometimes guiding me, often following, as I introduced him to things and people in his home region that even he didn’t know. Except for my propensity to gain weight when I spent time in the company of him and his robust appetite, I suppose I could travel with him for weeks on end, for I have know few more amiable companions.
Ambrosio loves to eat as much as anyone I have ever met. He relishes the intellectual aspects of gastronomy as well and can talk for hours about the art of eating, then on occasion after dinner, can spend another hilarious hour on the scatological joys of eliminating what he eats. He is a hefty man. One hot summer day, when I stopped by his home in Roa on a surprise visit when I was following Fran Rivera around Spain with a New York-based writer,I encountered Ambrosio shirtless, having a casual lunch with his family. When I kidded him about putting on weight, he clutched a roll of fat at his midsection, and told me, "That’s not me, that’s my shirt."
On several occasions, Ambrosio Molinos had told me about the Colegiata of Covarrubias and its famous polychrome wood triptych of the Epiphany, but on previous trips, it had been closed when I arrived, so this June day, I made arrangements to meet Ambrosio for lunch at a new Covarrubias restaurant, De Galo, and visit the Colegiata after lunch. It was to be another memorable day in Castile.
I arrived at a small parking area just outside the 16th-century gate that is the northern entrance to town just as Ambrosio was arriving in his Land Rover. As usual, we were both hungry, so lunch was the first order of business. It was three p.m., a civilized hour for two old friends and aficionados of good food to begin a serious lunch. However, on past trips, I had had little luck with the food in Covarrubias. I had distinctly bad memories from my first encounter years ago at the Parador de Arlanza across the Plaza Do a Urraca and the other restaurant on the square, Galín, was known for its middling comida casera ("home cooked" food), including olla podrida, literally, rotten pot stew, an undeservedly famous Castilian dish that Ambrosio had introduced me to a couple of years earlier.
One day over lunch at Julián de Tolosa, a trencherman’s Basque restaurant in Madrid, Ambrosio carefully related the recipe for a great rotten pot stew into my tape recorder, thus preserving for posterity the secret Castilian formula for mainlining pork: "First, an olla podrida should be made with alubias de Ibeas, the little black-red beans that come from around the village of Ibeas east of Burgos and are the best beans in Spain. That is most important. Then, in a clay stove top casserole, you slowly cook the beans with a special adobado (marinaded) pig foot, a marinaded pig’s ear, and pork ribs. The adobo marinade is made with salted water, to which orégano is added or, depending on the area, other spices such as black pepper, bay leaves, and paprika, sometimes even piquant paprika. The marinade, which gives the olla podrida its strong flavor, also preserves the meat, so it can be left all season in a cool place such as a basement or a cave. Then you put in some fatty chorizo, the one they call botage o, because it has a higher percentage of fat to lean, and some morcilla, blood sausage."
But, there is more. Ambrosio continued, " Once the olla podrida is cooked, you make what we call bolas, made from toasted hard bread that is then mixed some of the pork fat from the stew to make "balls," which are then fried and served on a platter alongside the olla. The meat that was cooked with the beans is served on a separate platter, the beans are also served on a separate dish, and guindillas, pickled onions and other pickled vegetables are served as a garnish. Then all you need is a big appetite." He then recommended a scandalous precaution, not to be repeated here, for the flatulence he said was sure to ensue from eating rotten pot stew.
I had gone with Ambrosio to one of these olla podrida pig-outs near Ibeas and he also had offered to take me to mother of all pig festivals at the Virrey Palafox restaurant in El Burgo de Osma in the neighboring province of Soria, where they have multi-course pig meals in February to celebrate the winter hog slaughter. But now, my concern was for Restaurante De Galo, whose chef-owner was the son of the owners of Galín, who were proud of their olla podrida. Just thinking about rotten pot stew conjured up visions of thousands of tiny porkers lumbering through my arteries in pursuit of the Pig Olympics gold medal for cardiac arrest.
Fortunately, De Galo turned out to be one of those great culinary surprises that can not only make your day, they can make your week and provoke future gastronomic pilgrimages. The restaurant was just inside the main village gateway, so we went straight in. Not only were we to have a great meal, I was introduced to another of the mysteries of Castile, one as basic to the human condition as food itself, but unique to this region and utterly fascinating. Inside the restaurant, in an ante room, was a cocina serrana, a "kitchen of the sierra," specifically the Sierra de la Demanda.
Inside what was essentially a large chimney that tapered gradually to a small opening at the top was a large hearth, surrounding on three sides by benches, where the mountain people could sit on cold winter evenings as stew pots bubbled away, keeping warm, having communal meals, and, no doubt, tertulias, or gab fests, of legendary import, almost certainly repeating the great oral histories of the region. These cocinas serranas are as snug as a teepee and once I had seen one, I was immediately reminded of the pre-television days of my youth in my Illinois village when the communal joys of family and friends were everything. (In the Hotel Arlanza, there is another cocina serrana, this one now a part of the hotel bar and with a television installed. Somehow, it does not have quite the same charm as the one in Restaurante De Galo.)
Our meal was as memorable as the cocina serrana. This man Galo could cook. We began by splitting a whole besugo escabechado, a sea bream marinated in an escabeche sauce and served cold. We mopped up the sauce with good coarse Castilian bread. Then came a local specialty that I seldom pass up when I see it on a Burgos-area menu, those alubias rojas de Ibeas that Ambrosio talked about. These were cooked with chorizo, served with grilled morcilla, and guindillas, the slender yellow-green piquant peppers that are a Basque specialty without which one, especially this one, does not consume his beans. The main course was vine-grilled baby lamb chops (served here with the kidneys), roasted potatoes, and what in recent years has become an indispensable side dish with roasted or grilled meats, delicious pimientos de piquillo, the sometimes slightly spicy little red peppers that are one of the great delicacies of Spain. We washed this repast down with a delicious, inexpensive Covarrubias wine from Ribera de Arlanza, a growing region that was on the verge of disappearing just a few years ago. Similar to a Ribera del Duero wine, but lighter and fresher, this Vi a Valdable, was not only perfect with the food, it cost less than the equivalent of $7. A café con leche, a delicious limited production Baines Pacharán from Navarra, and a Montecristo cigar were dessert, after which we would waddle off in the direction of the Colegiata.
Over the years, Ambrosio and I developed a running gastronomic joke. First, in the morning, we claim to just about anyone who will listen, we have some breakfast, at which we discuss where to make our first stop for tapas, where we plot where to stop for the merienda (a kind of in-between-meals snack). After the merienda, it goes without saying that we need another tapa before lunch. After lunch, another tapas opportunity is in order, so we can discuss where we are going for the afternoon merienda, pre-dinner tapas, and then dinner, nothing too heavy, of course. Then there is the tough decision about where to have after-dinner drinks and cigars.
It is mid summer and I am with Ambrosio and his family on a path half way up the hill that rises above Ambrosio’s hometown of Guzmán, a small village located at the western edge of Burgos province just a few kilometers from Roa in what used to be known as Old Castile. At ten in the evening, the sun has just gone down over the páramo, the great stark Castilian plateau, which so captivated the imaginations of such writers as Antonio Machado and Miguel Delibes.
The páramo, like the large herds of sheep which graze these ancient hills, has recently been shorn of its cover. Gone are the infinite rows of ripening wheat that wave seductively over these hills earlier in the summer; now the fields are uniformly close-cropped and lay in the soft evening light looking like large tawny lions. From here, I can see a vast section of the great wine-growing Duero river valley and, in the distance, more hills where the last rays of the sun bathe the occasional hill top village with a rich golden light.
The hill behind me is honeycombed with family-owned wine and cheese caves, cool manmade caverns which were already centuries-old when Columbus discovered America. In a little stone shed built into the hill, Ambrosio and Asunción, are laying out the fixings for a simple, but first-rate and unforgettable dinner: a salad of garden-picked lettuce, perfectly ripened flavorful tomatoes, and sweet Spanish onions; wedges of Ambrosio’s superb Burgos sheep’s milk queso Castellano, a delicious, slightly sharp, white cheese; round, thin slices of home-cured country chorizo; chuletillas (milk-fed lamb chops), and red cherries picked from a villager’s trees. The meal will be accompanied by the rustic, but delicious, country wine which Ambrosio and his father buy from the cooperative in the neighboring village of Quintanamanvirgo, then age in large old barrels down in the cave next door. Ambrosio ages cheeses in his cave.
Soon we descend into the pitch dark depths of the wine cave, lighting our way by candles. The bodega, as a wine cellar is called in Spain, is perfectly cool and properly humid for ageing wine. It is rustic, old, full of atmosphere. There are cobwebs, mold, 16-liter bulbous glass garrafas with cork stoppers, a modest stash of bottled wines, a couple of smaller barrels, and a large cuba barrel, where last year’s harvest of wine is gaining character. Using a siphon, Ambrosio draws a good measure of dark red Ribera del Duero wine into a porrón, a beaker-like pitcher with a neck for putting wine in and with a long needle-nosed spout. The spout facilitates sanitary communal drinking for those who have mastered its use and wine-stained shirts or blouses and good-natured expletives from those who haven’t.
Part of the ritual demands that we sample the wine from porrón down in the cave. Ambrosio lifts the beaker by its glass neck and places the tip of the spout just inside his open mouth without letting it touch his lips or tongue. He elevates the bottom of the beaker and a thin stream of wine flows out. Once the flow begins, Ambrosio gradually extends the porrón to arm’s length taking the wine into his mouth in an arching stream that flashes ruby in the flickering candle light. Watching someone drink from a porrón in one of these wine caves is spectacular, beautiful, folkloric. There is almost a religious quality to this rite, a discernible atavistic pull that binds those who share from this vessel. This wine bonding, camaraderie in a jug, is the stuff of vintage nostalgia.
After a couple of more rounds, we draw more wine to top up the porrón and climb the hand-hewn steps out of the cave into the fresh evening air. Around us, other villagers are also preparing al fresco dinners in their own hillside merenderos, as they call these little huts, few of which are anything more than a cave anteroom with a stone table in front.
One of Ambrosio’s friends from the village has brought up a bundle of grape vine cuttings, which he sets alight on the ground in front of a rough masonry retainer wall. A blaze roars several feet above the bundle. I photograph this culinary pyre with the tower of the village’s 16th-century church, the rust-red, tejas-tiled roofs, and the lovely pastel vestiges of the glorious sunset as a backdrop. While the flame is blazing itself out, leaving only squiggly, glowing vine embers that are perhaps the perfect fire for cooking chuletillas, Ambrosio loads a hinged grill with two dozen little lamb chops. The grill has handles so that the whole device can be flipped over to finish cooking the other side.
While the chuletillas are roasting, we pass around the porrón and Ambrosio starts telling us about his 70 year-old father’s wine drinking habits. Ambrosio claims, that his father--the late Ambrosio padre--in his youth, drank three to four liters of wine per day. Some field workers drank six, he says. He calculates that his father has drunk some 85,000 liters of wine in his life. "Tres camiones cisternas--three tank trucks full," he figures.
"His front tooth has a groove in it - - like limestone which water has dripped on for years - - where the stream of wine from the porrón hits it. When he had a stomach operation last year, the doctor told him he could only have one glass of wine per day, so he bought a very large glass. He refuses to drink water in months which have ‘r’ in them, so he still drinks a liter of wine a day."
Ambrosio’s hilarious account of his father’s love of wine is just the beginning. The smell of the fire-roasted lamb is irresistible and the cool wine flows freely, calling for another descent or two into the cave. We eat, drink, laugh, and talk until midnight. Out here in the Castilian countryside, the sky is a celestial canopy blazing with thousands of bright stars that seem to be hovering just above our heads. Finally, the cool air coaxes us down to the village bar for a café con leche and a brandy.
These are heavenly nights on the páramo of Castile.
Gerry Dawes©2008
gerrydawes@aol.com
Friday, September 26, 2008
Prologue: Monterey, California to Southern Spain
Before I was stationed in Spain in the United States Navy, my experience with wine—except for plying girlfriends back in Illinois with the occasional bottle of pink “Champagne”—came in California in the mid-1960s. On weekends on the mystical white beach at Carmel, with my buddies—all of us students at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey—and I shared the jugs of cheap California wines, along with bread and cheese from the Mediterranean Market in the village. One night under Monterey’s decaying old wharf, I helped two others polish off a gallon jug of Mountain Red—with miserable results. And once in a while on a payday weekend, I would splurge on abalone and a bottle of Almaden Emerald Riesling or some such at a restaurant on Monterey’s then-not-so-touristy Fisherman’s Wharf or have spaghetti and a wicker-wrapped, aptly-named fiasco of Chianti on Cannery Row, which at that time still had vestiges and whiffs of John Steinbeck’s time.
And, one August weekend in 1967, surrounded by a bristling, but soon-to-be-sent-home National Guard Troop (for a rock concert?), we watched and listened in wine-soaked reverie at the Monterey Pop Festival as Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Canned Heat and Otis Redding became international stars right before our mesmerized eyes and passed into legend.
At Southern Illinois University I had sporadically pursued a journalism major until 1965, when the Lyndon Baines Johnson-led United States government—opting first, or course, for those “who had not worked continuously towards a degree”— decided that they needed even more carrion candidates for Vietnam. I volunteered for the Navy as soon as I felt the hot breath of my local draft board breathing down my neck. To avoid the possibility of two years of infantry duty and possible death (certain in my mind), I enlisted for four years of life in the Navy, astutely calculating that aircraft carriers didn’t normally invade Vietnamese rice paddies.
Ironically, I damned near died from a bout with spinal meningitis that I contracted during basic training at Great Lakes Naval Station, where recruits were allowed some four hours sleep a night, which greatly contributed to a meningitis epidemic among them during that epoch. (In the middle of the night, we took turns guarding a laundry room, just in case, we surmised, the Viet Cong somehow managed to penetrate the heartland in the dead of a Lake Michigan winter to stage a surprise laundry raid).
After a four-month stay in the hospital, on the telephone I pestered the Navy bureaucrats in Washington until they sent me to the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, California, where I miraculously graduated as a poor-to-mediocre linguist. I left Monterey barely conversant in pidgin military Russian, but did learn to sing a transliterated version of “Dixie.”
After graduation, we were transferred for several months to Defense Department’s Top Secret Security School in San Angelo, Texas, a training assignment made memorable by a monumentally ignorant Chief Botswain’s Mate, who lined up a mostly college-educated crew of linguists and threatened to charge us for mutiny for failing to show up for a useless meeting after an all-night class. He punctuated his blustering by proclaiming the “ignorance in Botswain’s Mates went out with the sailing ships,” which caused the incredulous officers watching this absurd, worthy-of-a-M.A.S.H.- episode performance to stifle guffaws. The mutiny squelched, we surv ived to graduate. Just before we graduated, one day in class when my field assignment was announced as Spain, someone blurted, “You lucky bastard!” As it turned out, life’s lottery had handed me a winning ticket. As soon as class was over, I went straight to the base library and checked out the few books I could find on Spain.
Because of the military’s infinite wisdom and logic-defying precision, I was assigned for two years to the Rota Naval Base in Andalucía, from which periodically I was sent out riding the plane captain’s seat of antiquated, 1950s’ vintage, un-armed airplanes, including the great swept-wing hog, the A-3 Skywarrior, a converted fighter-bomber. Staging out of Greece and West Germany, we flew on electronic eavesdropping missions off the coasts of Egypt, Libya, East Germany, Poland, and Russia. It was my job to listen on a radio receiver and tape Russian military conversations. The first time I heard a MIG on our tail pretending to lock on with a missile, which would have turned us to toast in just a few seconds, I momentarily longed even for a rice paddy. Nevertheless, during my two-year tour of duty in Rota, between flying missions, I had time to begin discovering Spain and I began to develop an afición, a passion, for the country that has continued to grow for more than 35 years.
I was glad, deliriously glad, to be in Europe and not in Vietnam. By August of 1968, a year after that momentous Monterey Pop Festival, I found myself in a steamy second class train car rattling south through Andalucía towards El Puerto de Santa María with a group of Spanish conscripts, who would become my friends over the course of that summer as we traveled back-and-forth between our respective military assignments in Cádiz province and weekend R & R in their beautiful, mystical Sevilla, the quintessential city of southern Spain, which was rapidly becoming my adopted hometown.
On that slow rocking train in southern Spain, Roberto, one of my new Spanish soldier friends—most of whom came from La Alameda de Hércules, a Sevilla working class barrio—taught me how to cut a V-shaped wedge out of either side of a cork pulled from the label-less bottles of coarse, ice-cold, red vino corriente that I would purchase at station when the train stopped in heat-baked Utrera, south of Sevilla. Roberto would shove the cork back in the bottle and pass the wine around for all to share bota-style, each in turn tilting up the bottle and allowing the wine to flow in a stream into the drinker’s mouth without allowing the bottle to touch his lips. During the summer of 1968, I nearly mastered the art of hitting my mouth with a stream of red wine while standing in the passageway at the end of the swaying train car, through whose open doors warm air gushed, considerably increasing the degree of difficulty.
Wine-stained shirts and few bottles of wine were a small price to pay for many hours of the conviviality of these fun-loving Spanish soldiers. In addition to learning a modicum of unorthodox wine-drinking etiquette from Roberto and his friends, I picked up some Spanish by osmosis and was treated to impromptu flamenco singing accompanied by the staccato rhythms of my friends clapping palmas (which they also taught me). I was also given a share of Roberto's mother's superb tortillas españolas (Spain's classic potato omelettes that are sliced into wedges and eaten cold—then a traveller's staple in Spain). Each week, when we arrived in Sevilla, Roberto and his friends told me which train they would be taking back to their base in San Fernando. No matter what shape we were in after drinking multiple bottles of wine on the two-hour train ride, my new amigos always made sure I got off at El Puerto de Santa María, the great sherry town on the bay of Cádiz, where I would catch the shiny little local train to nearby Rota. There were big abrazos (embraces), waves, and good wishes from my new-found friends as I dis-embarked, then they were back to clapping and singing flamenco as their train creaked to life and rolled on to San Fernando, two stops down the line.
The sharp, metallic, chilled wine--which tasted far better with the good tortilla, Spanish olives, and rough country bread--was never more than poor to mediocre, but it was the camaraderie and conviviality of Roberto and his Sevillano friends sharing their food, songs, jokes, and stories with me that made those train trips so memorable and the ordinary wine and food a feast. On those wonderful “wild and weary” train rides through tawny summertime Spain, I also learned an indispensable rule about drinking vino—the most important thing about any bottle of wine is the people surrounding it. And in the process I developed a passion for Spain, Spaniards, and Spanish wine and food that has endured to this day.
My experiences with those Spanish soldiers set the tone for the stories that follow.
Gerry Dawes©2008
gerrydawes@aol.com
And, one August weekend in 1967, surrounded by a bristling, but soon-to-be-sent-home National Guard Troop (for a rock concert?), we watched and listened in wine-soaked reverie at the Monterey Pop Festival as Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Canned Heat and Otis Redding became international stars right before our mesmerized eyes and passed into legend.
At Southern Illinois University I had sporadically pursued a journalism major until 1965, when the Lyndon Baines Johnson-led United States government—opting first, or course, for those “who had not worked continuously towards a degree”— decided that they needed even more carrion candidates for Vietnam. I volunteered for the Navy as soon as I felt the hot breath of my local draft board breathing down my neck. To avoid the possibility of two years of infantry duty and possible death (certain in my mind), I enlisted for four years of life in the Navy, astutely calculating that aircraft carriers didn’t normally invade Vietnamese rice paddies.
Ironically, I damned near died from a bout with spinal meningitis that I contracted during basic training at Great Lakes Naval Station, where recruits were allowed some four hours sleep a night, which greatly contributed to a meningitis epidemic among them during that epoch. (In the middle of the night, we took turns guarding a laundry room, just in case, we surmised, the Viet Cong somehow managed to penetrate the heartland in the dead of a Lake Michigan winter to stage a surprise laundry raid).
After a four-month stay in the hospital, on the telephone I pestered the Navy bureaucrats in Washington until they sent me to the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, California, where I miraculously graduated as a poor-to-mediocre linguist. I left Monterey barely conversant in pidgin military Russian, but did learn to sing a transliterated version of “Dixie.”
After graduation, we were transferred for several months to Defense Department’s Top Secret Security School in San Angelo, Texas, a training assignment made memorable by a monumentally ignorant Chief Botswain’s Mate, who lined up a mostly college-educated crew of linguists and threatened to charge us for mutiny for failing to show up for a useless meeting after an all-night class. He punctuated his blustering by proclaiming the “ignorance in Botswain’s Mates went out with the sailing ships,” which caused the incredulous officers watching this absurd, worthy-of-a-M.A.S.H.- episode performance to stifle guffaws. The mutiny squelched, we surv ived to graduate. Just before we graduated, one day in class when my field assignment was announced as Spain, someone blurted, “You lucky bastard!” As it turned out, life’s lottery had handed me a winning ticket. As soon as class was over, I went straight to the base library and checked out the few books I could find on Spain.
Because of the military’s infinite wisdom and logic-defying precision, I was assigned for two years to the Rota Naval Base in Andalucía, from which periodically I was sent out riding the plane captain’s seat of antiquated, 1950s’ vintage, un-armed airplanes, including the great swept-wing hog, the A-3 Skywarrior, a converted fighter-bomber. Staging out of Greece and West Germany, we flew on electronic eavesdropping missions off the coasts of Egypt, Libya, East Germany, Poland, and Russia. It was my job to listen on a radio receiver and tape Russian military conversations. The first time I heard a MIG on our tail pretending to lock on with a missile, which would have turned us to toast in just a few seconds, I momentarily longed even for a rice paddy. Nevertheless, during my two-year tour of duty in Rota, between flying missions, I had time to begin discovering Spain and I began to develop an afición, a passion, for the country that has continued to grow for more than 35 years.
I was glad, deliriously glad, to be in Europe and not in Vietnam. By August of 1968, a year after that momentous Monterey Pop Festival, I found myself in a steamy second class train car rattling south through Andalucía towards El Puerto de Santa María with a group of Spanish conscripts, who would become my friends over the course of that summer as we traveled back-and-forth between our respective military assignments in Cádiz province and weekend R & R in their beautiful, mystical Sevilla, the quintessential city of southern Spain, which was rapidly becoming my adopted hometown.
On that slow rocking train in southern Spain, Roberto, one of my new Spanish soldier friends—most of whom came from La Alameda de Hércules, a Sevilla working class barrio—taught me how to cut a V-shaped wedge out of either side of a cork pulled from the label-less bottles of coarse, ice-cold, red vino corriente that I would purchase at station when the train stopped in heat-baked Utrera, south of Sevilla. Roberto would shove the cork back in the bottle and pass the wine around for all to share bota-style, each in turn tilting up the bottle and allowing the wine to flow in a stream into the drinker’s mouth without allowing the bottle to touch his lips. During the summer of 1968, I nearly mastered the art of hitting my mouth with a stream of red wine while standing in the passageway at the end of the swaying train car, through whose open doors warm air gushed, considerably increasing the degree of difficulty.
Wine-stained shirts and few bottles of wine were a small price to pay for many hours of the conviviality of these fun-loving Spanish soldiers. In addition to learning a modicum of unorthodox wine-drinking etiquette from Roberto and his friends, I picked up some Spanish by osmosis and was treated to impromptu flamenco singing accompanied by the staccato rhythms of my friends clapping palmas (which they also taught me). I was also given a share of Roberto's mother's superb tortillas españolas (Spain's classic potato omelettes that are sliced into wedges and eaten cold—then a traveller's staple in Spain). Each week, when we arrived in Sevilla, Roberto and his friends told me which train they would be taking back to their base in San Fernando. No matter what shape we were in after drinking multiple bottles of wine on the two-hour train ride, my new amigos always made sure I got off at El Puerto de Santa María, the great sherry town on the bay of Cádiz, where I would catch the shiny little local train to nearby Rota. There were big abrazos (embraces), waves, and good wishes from my new-found friends as I dis-embarked, then they were back to clapping and singing flamenco as their train creaked to life and rolled on to San Fernando, two stops down the line.
The sharp, metallic, chilled wine--which tasted far better with the good tortilla, Spanish olives, and rough country bread--was never more than poor to mediocre, but it was the camaraderie and conviviality of Roberto and his Sevillano friends sharing their food, songs, jokes, and stories with me that made those train trips so memorable and the ordinary wine and food a feast. On those wonderful “wild and weary” train rides through tawny summertime Spain, I also learned an indispensable rule about drinking vino—the most important thing about any bottle of wine is the people surrounding it. And in the process I developed a passion for Spain, Spaniards, and Spanish wine and food that has endured to this day.
My experiences with those Spanish soldiers set the tone for the stories that follow.
Gerry Dawes©2008
gerrydawes@aol.com
La Rioja: R. López de Heredia, The Wines of Yesterday
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La Rioja: The Wines of Yesterday R. López de Heredia Slideshow
Double click on the slide show, then when the Google album comes up, click
on slideshow link to the right and go to a full screen view.
During the 1970s when I lived in southern Spain, the northern wine district of Rioja came to represent an oasis to me during the hot, rainless summers of Andalucia, my spiritual home. By early July, the heat settles in over a large portion of Spain. The sun bears down relentlessly, especially in the Mediterranean portions of the country, driving millions of Spaniards to the beaches and cool mountain resorts. Coinciding with this time of year was our annual, much anticipated trek to Pamplona, where Hemingway's inveterate lost souls come from all over the world to see the sun rise on yet another Fiesta de San Fermín, which he immortalized in The Sun Also Rises. Since my former wife Diana and I counted ourselves among the admirers of the venerable Don Ernesto's fiesta, we too joined the migration each year.
We always set out at least a week before the commencement of festivities at Pamplona, so we could explore the Spanish countryside along the way. On one of these trips, we discovered the Rioja and it became our favorite place to pass some quiet time before surrendering to the wild, week-long festivities at Pamplona, where peace, tranquillity, and sleep are rare commodities and not even particularly desirable ones at that. We looked forward to the Rioja country, where we could taste fine wines in cool bodegas, sample superb country cuisine, and enjoy the scenery, history, and milder climate of this high mountain valley.
These were the days long before modern super highways were built across Spain and before most cars, including our magnificent Volkswagen sedan, Rocinante, had air-conditioning, so to avoid some of the scorching road heat of summertime Spain, in late afternoon we would leave Mijas, our pueblo on a mountain overlooking the Costa del Sol. We would drive into the wee hours of morning to escape the steady daytime flow of North African workers and their families, who once released on their month-long holiday from Northern European factories, maniacally pushed their lumbering, overloaded cars and vans down through Spain, hell-bent on reaching the beaches and homeward-bound ferries of the southern coast. Apart from diminishing our chances of being maimed by a Peugeot or a Mercedes van, the night offered some relief from being stuck behind the long queues of laboring Spanish trucks belching noxious black exhaust.
After stopping for a brief sleep at a Valdepeñas pensión, we would drive on through Madrid in the early morning hours to reach the ancient Castilian capital of Burgos–the city of El Cid–by midday. There we headed East towards the Rioja. In less than an hour, as the road climbed, the vegetation became increasingly verdant, the air fresher and cooler. The greener landscape, now showing some vineyards, soothes the soul as well as the body as the heavy layers of oppressive road heat peel away. The promise of a thundershower bringing the cool, night breezes of the Rioja would soon put the dust of the southern summer behind us.
We had arranged for two old friends, Alice Hall, the dowager empress of American bullfight aficionados of Milledgeville, Georgia and Carolyn Moyer of Davis, California to join us in a tour of the Rioja on our way to Pamplona. On this occasion, in 1973, we had written the firm of R. López de Heredia at Haro, the wine capital of La Rioja Alta, letting them know that we again wished to visit their bodega. The reply had come in the charming, graceful Spanish of a more genteel age. It went something like, "...We cannot tell you what joy the news of your imminent visit has produced in our bodega. It would be our great pleasure to receive you."
By 10:00 on the morning of our visit, after a breakfast of rolls and café con leche, the four of us were down in the bodegas of R. López de Heredia for our "second breakfast" - - a wine tasting. Here, in surroundings as incredible as any I have known in the world of wine, Sr. Anastasio Gútierrez Angulo, the firm's export manager, let us taste some of his twenty-year old reservas–wines made in the style of a different era–wines of yesterday.
We always set out at least a week before the commencement of festivities at Pamplona, so we could explore the Spanish countryside along the way. On one of these trips, we discovered the Rioja and it became our favorite place to pass some quiet time before surrendering to the wild, week-long festivities at Pamplona, where peace, tranquillity, and sleep are rare commodities and not even particularly desirable ones at that. We looked forward to the Rioja country, where we could taste fine wines in cool bodegas, sample superb country cuisine, and enjoy the scenery, history, and milder climate of this high mountain valley.
These were the days long before modern super highways were built across Spain and before most cars, including our magnificent Volkswagen sedan, Rocinante, had air-conditioning, so to avoid some of the scorching road heat of summertime Spain, in late afternoon we would leave Mijas, our pueblo on a mountain overlooking the Costa del Sol. We would drive into the wee hours of morning to escape the steady daytime flow of North African workers and their families, who once released on their month-long holiday from Northern European factories, maniacally pushed their lumbering, overloaded cars and vans down through Spain, hell-bent on reaching the beaches and homeward-bound ferries of the southern coast. Apart from diminishing our chances of being maimed by a Peugeot or a Mercedes van, the night offered some relief from being stuck behind the long queues of laboring Spanish trucks belching noxious black exhaust.
After stopping for a brief sleep at a Valdepeñas pensión, we would drive on through Madrid in the early morning hours to reach the ancient Castilian capital of Burgos–the city of El Cid–by midday. There we headed East towards the Rioja. In less than an hour, as the road climbed, the vegetation became increasingly verdant, the air fresher and cooler. The greener landscape, now showing some vineyards, soothes the soul as well as the body as the heavy layers of oppressive road heat peel away. The promise of a thundershower bringing the cool, night breezes of the Rioja would soon put the dust of the southern summer behind us.
We had arranged for two old friends, Alice Hall, the dowager empress of American bullfight aficionados of Milledgeville, Georgia and Carolyn Moyer of Davis, California to join us in a tour of the Rioja on our way to Pamplona. On this occasion, in 1973, we had written the firm of R. López de Heredia at Haro, the wine capital of La Rioja Alta, letting them know that we again wished to visit their bodega. The reply had come in the charming, graceful Spanish of a more genteel age. It went something like, "...We cannot tell you what joy the news of your imminent visit has produced in our bodega. It would be our great pleasure to receive you."
By 10:00 on the morning of our visit, after a breakfast of rolls and café con leche, the four of us were down in the bodegas of R. López de Heredia for our "second breakfast" - - a wine tasting. Here, in surroundings as incredible as any I have known in the world of wine, Sr. Anastasio Gútierrez Angulo, the firm's export manager, let us taste some of his twenty-year old reservas–wines made in the style of a different era–wines of yesterday.
The bodega had all the trappings of a nineteenth-century operation patterned on the chais of Bordeaux (and in 2008, still does). The winery workers even wear blue coveralls as many of the staff at French chateaux still do. In time-honored fashion, barrels are still crafted in the winery's own cooperage. We saw workers cracking eggs from the firm's chicken farm to get fresh egg whites for fining the wines. Other employees laboriously filled bottles with reserva wines by hand and corked them with a hand-operated corking device.
Anastasio led us through a man-made maze of cool, barrel-filled limestone caves to the deepest part of the bodega - the room known at R. Lopez de Heredia as the cementerio - the cemetery. The cementerio is the resting place of the old vintage reservas dating from the founding of the firm in 1877. This cellar gets its name from the storage bins lining its walls, which very much resemble the burial niches in the Roman-plan cemeteries of Spain. Bin after bin is filled with dusty bottles from the greatest vintages of the past. At one end of the room is a large round wooden table whose centerpiece is a huge, gnarled, cobweb-covered old grapevine surrounded by bottles of wine.
Our host, Anastasio, had selected two gran reservas from the fine 1954 vintage for us to taste. The first was Viña Tondonia Gran Reserva, a lovely, elegant Bordeaux-style wine of breed and complexity. The second wine was a more intense, dark ruby wine in a burgundy bottle, Viña Bosconia Gran Reserva, which was showing signs of evolving into a big, warm, rich wine - aterciopelado (velvety), as the Spaniards call it. The Viña Bosconia had a particularly beautiful nose, one which reminded me of a wonderful phrase that Michael Wigram, a wealthy Englishman who lives in Madrid and is and one of the world’s foremost bullfight aficionados, had used to describe another 1954 reserva at a luncheon during the Feria de Sevilla in 1973, "Gets a nice bloom on it after nineteen years, don't you think?"
These wines did indeed have "a nice bloom" on them. They were wines to be enjoyed, not merely tasted and spit on the floor of the bodega, so we sipped them while Anastasio gave us the most charming description of Rioja winemaking I have ever heard. First he described the normal processes of vinification, barrel aging, bottling, and so forth for the bodega's "bread and butter" - the table wines made to sell in the fourth, fifth, and sixth years after the vintage. Then, when he came to the subject of gran reservas, the classic Rioja reservas from exceptional vintages, he began to speak of the wine as a living thing. In this place called the cemetery, he brought his wines to life. Speaking softly, but with passion in his beautifully enunciated Castilian Spanish, he described the wine's "education."
"You see," he began, "in the beginning, a gran reserva is like a young man. Here in the bodega, he gets a proper `education,' then is bottled and becomes a young caballero. At about 25 years he reaches the peak of his youth, then he mellows out to about the age of, say, 35-40, when he gradually begins to tail off. However, some of these fellows do well even after fifty. A few years ago the owners allowed three bottles of the 1914s to be opened for a celebration. The second bottle was in fine condition."
It would be a day to remember - Anastasio's wonderful analogy and his beautiful wines were just the beginning. We were four good friends glowing with wine and in the mood for fiesta. At Merendero Toni in San Vicente de la Sonsierra, we lingered over one of those wonderful Spanish lunches: a simple salad of garden-ripened tomatoes, lettuce, and onions at the peak of their flavor, succulent baby lamb chops al sarmiento (grilled over grapevine prunings), crisp fried potatoes, and lots of vino tinto de la Rioja.
After lunch, with a tape playing jotas, the folk songs of Navarra, La Rioja and Aragón, we took the breathtaking drive up to the Balcon de la Rioja for splendid views of the entire Rioja valley. Diana and Alice, euphoric from the wine, the food, and the splendor of the day, danced the jota on the mountain as a Spanish family stared incredulously at two foreigners–Alice a septuagenarian at that–performing the lively regional dance of northern Spain in their own private fiesta.
Over the years, I drank many bottles of López de Heredia’s wines including the 1942 Viña Bosconia and 1947 Viña Bosconia, which at the time I thought were two of the greatest red wine I had ever drunk. I also visited López de Heredia several times and became friends with Anastasio Gútierrez and Pepe Osses, who succeeded him.
One day Anastasio and I were touring the bodega. We had just come out of the firm’s picturesque cooper’s shop, which has always reminded me of Diego Velasquez’s Vulcan’s Forge in the Prado. Suddenly, there in front of us was an old man in a wheelchair. He wore a black beret, wore a sweater and had a terribly swollen, bare foot that looked like a encrusted stump.
“¿Ya sabes quien es (you know who this is)?” Anastasio asked me. It was Don Rafael López de Heredia–the son and namesake of the bodega’s founder of the bodega–who, from the looks of his foot, was in the twilight of his life. He still made the rounds of the bodega every day though, coming down from his office in the winery‘s marvelous red-trimmed, landmark arte nouveau tower via the elevator that had been built especially for him.
Anastasio introduced me to him and we shook hands. I was excited to finally meet a family member after half a dozen visits to the winery. I asked him if he minded if I photographed him. He didn’t and I took several color slides. When I put the camera aside, he asked me, “Well, if you took my photograph, you surely won’t mind if I take yours.” He pulled out a camera that he always carried with him and took my picture. I was astounded that this bright, but dying, old man loved photography as much as I did.
Before the encounter with Don Rafael, Anastasio and I had been tasting several of López de Heredia’s wonderful wines in the cementerio and, as I described on my first visit, they were not wines to spit on the floor, nor did I. Perhaps that led to my confusing the two cameras that I was carrying. Don Rafael left and, since the roll in one camera was finished, I rewound it. As I was talking to Anastasio, I started to reload the camera. To my horror, I opened the camera in which the roll was not finished, the one with the photographs of Don Rafael on it. I soon as I saw what I had done, I snapped the back shut and rewound the film. When I returned to New York, I had the film developed. There was the image of Don Rafael, clear and bright, but with rays from the light flashing on the film all around. They were strange pictures, ruined for publication, but I kept them, perhaps to use if I ever needed to describe him in detail. Later I would discover that those photographs were the last ones ever taken of Don Rafael. Shortly after my visit, he died.
Years later, I visited Anastasio at the bodega again and took several photographs of him. It was clear that he was near retirement. In the late 1980s, I was visiting López de Heredia in the company of Pepe Osses and I asked him about Anastasio. Pepe told me that Anastasio had retired and had been ill, but he had told him I was coming and that I wanted to see him. I telephoned Anastasio from the bodega to let him know that I had arrived and he said he would come down. “I have something for you.”
Pepe and I were tasting a fine old vintage of Viña Tondonia when Anastasio arrived. We embraced and I felt how frail he was. I had know him almost fifteen years by then. He had a folder with him and he pulled a photograph from it. “I thought you might want this,” he said, and handed me a photograph of myself, taken by Don Rafael López de Heredia during that chance encounter several years earlier. Tears came to my eyes. I was overwhelmed. I hugged Anastasio again and thanked him, then raised my glass of Tondonia and toasted him, “Mil gracias, mí viejo amigo, mil gracias.” It was a fabulous and thoughtful present from an old friend.
It was the last time I ever saw Anastasio. He died shortly after my visit, but I still visit , because it is one of the world’s most wonderful, picturesque, and traditional bodegas. Now I stop in to see my old friend, Pepe Osses; the current director, Pedro López de Heredia; Pedro’s thirty-something daughters Maria Jésus and Mercedes; and son-in-law, Carlos, all of whom help carry on the tradition.
María Jésus López de Heredia in El Cementerio.
During a visit in 2002, just a year short of the 20th anniversary of my first visit to López de Heredia, I was invited to dinner at the winery with some thirty other Spanish and foreign wine writers who were attending a three-day tasting session of Rioja wines called Los Grandes de la Rioja. Formal dining tables were set up inside one of the most spectacular naves of the bodega. We were surrounded by huge 50,000-liter wooden vats that have been used to ferment and store wines here for more than a century. The subdued lighting, from old style, low-wattage and flickering candles created a fantastic ambience. I was seated next to María Jésus López de Heredia, with whom I had become friends in recent years. As we were chatting during dinner, I told her about my experiences with the 1947 Viña Bosconia in the mid-1870s and told her that I still believed after more than 30 years of drinking Spanish wines and 20 years selling the best wines of France, Italia and the United States to the top restaurants in New York, the 1947 Bosconia was still the best red wine I had ever drunk.
“Have you tasted it recently?” I asked.
“No, but, if you think it is that good, there we are going to taste it now. Just don’t tell anyone else,” she answered.
Maria Jésus called a bodega worker over and had a brief discreet discussion. The man left the room and ten minutes later returned with two bottles from the cementerio, one of which he opened on an empty station table between two of the wine vats, the other was a backup bottle in case the first bottle was flawed. It was the 1947 Bosconia, now 57 years old. It had been one of Anastasio’s young lads of 27 when I last drank it in 1974. Now, even with another 29 years tacked on, the wine was still magnificent. I was gratified to find that it every bit as stupendous as had I imagined it to be all these years. It was easily a 100-point wine, even coming on the heels of the great 1964 Viña Tondonia and 1964 Viña Bosconia–itself a 98-point maravilla– that we had drunk earlier at the dinner. No fading rose, the 1947 Bosconia still had a deep black ruby color and fabulous deep, ripe nose. The great acidity was in perfect balance with delicious fruit and still firm tannins, which needed food to soften them up.
Even though Maria Jésus had sworn us the secrecy, the wine caused quite a stir at our table. We attracted the attention of her sister, Mercedes, who upon quizzing Maria Jésus, demanded that the other bottle of 1947 Bosconia be opened for her table. I called Paul White, an American wine writer who lives in New Zealand, aside and shared some of my glass with him. He, too, was astounded by the quality of this nearly 60-year old perfectly preserved museum piece that has stood the test of time and represents the pinnacle of quality that La Rioja is capable of obtaining–wines that do indeed still have a beautiful “bloom” to them even decades after the wines were made.
For the past decade, denigrating the traditional wine houses of La Rioja has become a significant national pastime among Spanish wine writers, many of whom would have us believe that truly great wines must be dark as ink, overripe, above 14% alcohol and infused with enough new oak flavor to evoke visions of a sawmill. The time-honored house of R. López de Heredia, who has been making fine wines for more than 125 years came under attack as colorless, flavorless wines made by antiquated methods. I feared that they would have to dramatically change their philosophy and the style of their wines to survive. It has been heartening in the past few years to see young sommeliers from the United States and other countries embrace these wines for what they are: the unique, finely crafted, wonderfully drinkable wines of another era. I call them the wines of yesterday.
– The End –
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Sunset in a Glass: Drinking Manzanilla Sherry at the Source
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El Rocío pilgrimage, crossing the Guadalquivir at Sanlúcar de Barrameda
Gerry Dawes copyright 2008
In Sanlúcar de Barrameda, which along with Jerez de la Frontera and Puerto de Santa Maria, is one of Spain’s three great sherry producing towns, Javier Hidalgo, producer of La Gitana manzanilla and an old friend, once told me, “If you ever have a glass of manzanilla at sunset on Bajo de Guía beach, you will never have another glass of manzanilla anywhere in the world without seeing the Sanlúcar sunset in the glass.”
That sounds like a zealous public relations invention until you have actually seen a Sanlúcar sunset with a glass of manzanilla in your hand. Picture yourself on Bajo de Guía beach at the western edge of Sanlúcar. The main part of town, where most of the sherry bodegas are located, is perhaps a kilometer behind you. Before you is a broad river, the Guadalquiver, emptying into the Atlantic Ocean, a vista which stretches to the horizon. On the far bank of the river is the Coto Doñana, one of the greatest wildlife preserves and bird sanctuaries left in Europe and it is pristine, except for a small guard building on the shore and the remnants of a picnic carelessly left behind, which has drawn a wild boar down to the beach to forage. In the foreground, fishing boats roll in the gently lapping waves. A pair of old beached boats and several overturned fisherman’s dinghies, which make could seats for the viewing the sunset, are scattered along the beach.
Langostinos de Sanlúcar with La Gitana manzanilla, evening, Sanlúcar de Barrameda.
Just before sunset, I usually purchase a couple of ice-cold half bottles of manzanilla, a plate of the famous langostinos de Sanlúcar (spectacular prawns), and some olives from Bigote, Casa Juan, or Mirador de Doñana, just three of more than a half dozen quality seafood restaur-ants facing the beach. I convince the owners that I will indeed return their catavinos, sherry glasses, and traipse across the sand with my culinary booty, the borrowed glasses, and my companion or companions (I once did this with a gourmet crowd of fifty people, including Chefs Allen Susser, Mark Miller, Jimmy Schmidt, and Robert del Grande) to one of the fisherman’s dinghies, preferably one with a flat bottom to serve as a table. I stake my claim to primo viewing rights, pull the tapón (stopper) from one of the bottles, pour a glass of manzanilla, and toast those who are going to watch today’s version of one of nature’s finer miracles with me. I never forget to toast my own good fortune at being in Sanlúcar de Barrameda at sunset once again.
La Gitana manzanilla, half bottle chilled
Gerry Dawes copyright 2004
As the sun begins to sink into the sea way out at what once was the far reaches of the ancient mariner’s world - - Sanlúcar is west of the straits of Gibraltar, the Pillars of Hercules, beyond whose gates lay the unknown terrors of the vast open sea - - you almost expect the water to hiss as the blazing globe sinks below the horizon. One wonders what the sailors who accompanied Columbus when he sailed from Palos just 50 kilometers west of here - - Columbus sailed from Sanlúcar on his third voyage - - must have been thinking. Gazing out there in the direction of that magnificent golden sphere, you can imagine all those treasure-laden ships sailing into Sanlúcar, which was the customs point where the gold and silver was counted before the ships could proceed upriver to Sevilla, yet another place for this rich lucre to change hands before eventually ending up in the hands of German bankers. When you also know that most of the sailors who accompanied Magellan, when he sailed from Sanlúcar in an attempt to circumnavigate the earth, died and only one crippled ship commanded by a Basque, Juan Sebastián Elkano of Getaria, came limping back here three years later, you have a palpable sense of a monumental history to go with your sunset, your manzanilla, and your succulent langostinos.
The sun disappears beyond the horizon, ending another day, and its golden glow is replaced by an enchanting array of yellows, reds, blues, purples. The first bottle of manzanilla is now a soldado muerto, (a “dead soldier”) and we are into the second or third, lulled into a delicious state of reverie by the wine, the beauty of the sunset’s changing colors (now they are pastels), and the smell of the sea. The cares of the modern world have been reduced to a speck on my mind’s horizon - - a speck that soon becomes the twinkling of the evening star as it appears, growing brighter as the Technicolor background grows darker. This evening star was called lucero by the ancients who did not realize it was the same as the morning star, Venus, so they built temples to both. They say Sanlúcar’s name is derived from lucero.
As the star grows brighter, so do the lights beckoning from the bars and restaurants along Bajo de Guía beach. Enticing smells of grilled seafood, garlic, and spices drift across the sands, finishing the splendid job of whetting the appetite that the maritime air and the manzanilla have already begun. We have extracted the last hues of exquisite beauty from nature’s light show and savored the last drops of our manzanilla, so we head for Casa Bigote, a favorite tapas bar and my candidate for the greatest bar on earth.
Bigote is an old-time fisherman’s tavern, a real taberna marinera so picturesque in its trappings that it could have been created by the Ministry of Tourism, except it is too authentic to have been fabricated. At the entrance to the bar, there are the ubiquitous bullfight posters, the mounted head of a fighting bull, and a number of taurine photographs of local bullfighters (the second most famous product of Sanlúcar after manzanilla), many of whom have been very successful. Inside the bar, apart from bullfight paraphernalia, the decoration - - calling it decoration is being charitable - - is nautical, maritime, (actually the stuff that fishermen have dragged up in their nets for the last several decades), authentic, raffish, unique, and utterly captivating.
Bar Bigote
Gerry Dawes copyright 2008
Behind the bar, perched on a small upturned barrel of Barbiana Amontillado Viejo, is a small image of the Virgen del Carmen (the patroness of the fishermen) mounted in the yawning jawbone of a small shark. On the wall behind the bar is a huge tortoise shell with “Bar Bigote - Bajo de Guía” spelled out with pieces of fisherman’s rope, several starfish, all sorts of odd crustaceans, a mounted fish, a whale bone, and photographs of a whale beached at Sanlúcar. And suspended from the rafters, along with a blowfish, are amphoras, the pottery urns, which were used in the days when Spain was a part of the Roman Empire to ship wine, oil, olives, pickled fish, and other foodstuffs back to Rome.
Among the habitues of Bigote is the great José Martínez “Limeño,” one of my oldest friends in Spain and the padrino of Sanlúcar’s bullfighters. Limeño gained fame as a journeyman matador, who became so good at fighting the feared Miura breed that he won the trophy as the best bullfighter in the Feria de Sevilla, one of Spain’s most prestigious taurine events, three years in a row, something not even Juan Belmonte, Manolete, or Antonio Ordoñez had accomplished. I almost never visit Sanlúcar without meeting Limeño at Bar Bigote and for over the more than 25 years I have known him, he has been proved to be the catalyst for many of my most memorable wining and dining experiences in this extraordinary town. This evening is no different. I am meeting Limeño at Bigote.
Bar Bigote, El Rocio, Guadalquivir Crossing Day
Gerry Dawes copyright 2008
Bigote grew spontaneously as a by-product of this legendary port. It is now the successful creation of the owners, Fernando and Paco Hermoso, and three generations of fishermen who have frequented this place since the Hermoso’s father opened it in more than fifty years ago. The Hermoso brothers’ father was a fisherman with a large bigote, a moustache. In 1951, he opened a little bar on Bajo de Guía beach, when it used to be the point where the fisherman unloaded their catch (before they moved to the new port in the little suburb of Bonanza, a couple of kilometers away). The fishermen and the owner of the boat would go to Bigote after the catch was sold to divvy up the proceeds of the day’s catch and drink manzanilla. Señor Hermoso ran his little bar there until 1967, when he followed the fishing fleet upriver to Bonanza, Sanlúcar’s then-new fisherman’s port and site of the afternoon fish auction, which is conducted by a reverse bidding procedure in which the ceiling price is quoted first. Fernando and Paco Hermoso stayed at the original Bigote. Soon, they added a kitchen and a coffee machine.
Fernando Hermoso is the chef. He learned to cook for the crew of young fishermen with whom he worked in the local waters. He has a natural talent for the great guiso marineros, or fishermen’s stews, for which Sanlúcar is famous. Aside from Bigote’s own considerable attraction as one of the greatest places in Spain to eat seafood (and drink manzanilla), one of Fernando’s dishes - - huevo marinero - - has provoked many a gastronomic pilgrimage on its own. Huevo marinero, is a sublime dish of monkfish and shrimp, cooked with olive oil and manzanilla in a cazuela, a ceramics baking and serving dish. When the dish is bubbling hot, it is pulled from the fire, a fresh egg is cracked on top and is the yolk is still setting up as it is served. With a copita of manzanilla and a piece of local bread to mop up the sauce, this “fisherman’s egg,” is not just food, it is a culinary epiphany. Fernando is also famous for his rape a la marinera (another monkfish cazuela dish with saffron sauce) and raya a la naranja agría (skate in a sauce made with the juice of bitter oranges, the kind used to make orange marmalade).
Fernando Hermoso, Chef-partner, Bigote, Sanlúcar de Barrameda
Gerry Dawes copyright 2008
Several years ago Fernando and Paco expanded into the building across a little alleyway from the bar and have formal dining rooms where they serve a maximum of 150 costumers per meal. There is usually one seating only; many people reserve two weeks in advance and start eating lunch here at 3:30 - 4:00 p.m.
Bar Bigote, Fernando Hermoso
Gerry Dawes copyright 2008
Bigote serves fish and shellfish from the area around Sanlúcar. They claim they don’t use fish from the North or the Mediterranean, nor do they serve frozen fish. In stormy weather when the fishing boats are kept in port for several days, the Hermoso brothers have been known to close the restaurant and just serve drinks at the bar. They try to serve only fish from that day’s catch for dinner that evening and at lunch the next day. Fernando waits each day at 5 p.m. for the catch to arrive. They use shaved ice, nieve or “snow” they call it, to keep fish cold in wooden crates, just as they come in from the fishing boats. They leave the ice on the fish, even in the refrigerators where it is stored. Fernando says the refrigerator is just to keep the “snow” from melting. As long as the ice stays on top the fish, it does not dehydrate in the dry cold of the refrigerator.
While I am waiting for Pepe Limeño, I order another glass of manzanilla, some house-cured olives, and a tapa, or small snack, of boquerones - - small, fresh whole anchovies, battered and flash deep-fried. The skin is crisp, but the anchovies are perfectly fried,moist, not greasy. Andalucians and Bigote, in particular, have elevated frying fish to an art form. It is said that the Japanese learned the art of frying fish from Spanish and Portuguese sailors in the 16th Century.
At about 9:30 p.m., Limeño appears, and there are abrazos (the friendly embrace that takes the place of a handshake amongst friends in Spain) all around. Nearly twenty years retired from the bull ring, he is still greeted by half the bar patrons before he can settle in for a manzanilla and a tapa. His appearance assures us of two things: We will dine informally, but exceptionally well, and we will consume our share of manzanilla. Limeño always seems to know which restaurant is serving the best current specialty. Sometimes we end up eating at tables outdoors along the beach, dining on tiny clams cooked in garlic, parsley, and wine sauce; another time we sample Fernando’s excellent fish-and-shellfish stews; and in an upstairs dining room down the beach, we have plates of salad followed by heaping platters of pescaito frito, perfectly fried fish - - acedías (baby sole), pijotas (small whiting fried with their tails stuck in their mouths), and calamares (fried squid).
Pescaito frito, tortillitas de camarones, Bar Balbino, Sanlúcar de Barrameda
Gerry Dawes copyright 2004
Langostinos & Manzanilla
Gerry Dawes copyright 2008
And sometime during our long, sometimes peripatetic, bar-hopping, lunches or dinners together, we have langostinos de Sanlúcar, those superb tiger prawns which can cost up to $60 per pound, depending on the season. And always, those chilled half bottles of manzanilla, sometimes Víncola Hidalgo’s La Gitana, a manzanilla fina, but just as often, the gold-tinged San León, a gutsy manzanilla pasada from Argüeso. And as we lift our glasses for yet another toast, I can still see the Sanlúcar sunset in the glass. Javier Hidalgo was right!!
Gerry Dawes copyright 2008
Chapter Sidebar - Manzanilla
Manzanilla has become such a runaway favorite in Spain that it now outsells fino sherry by more than two to one. In fact, at last report, 70% of the dry sherry sold in Spain was manzanilla. It is the drink of choice at most fiestas in southern Spain and can now be found fresh in the bars and restaurants of Madrid and many other northern cities.
Manzanilla is a fino-type sherry, sometimes called el mas fino de los finos, the finest, the most elegant wine, of the fino family, which includes manzanillas, finos, and amontillados. It comes only from Sanlúcar de Barrameda and has its own denominación de origen, Spain’s equivalent of appellation controlée, called Manzanilla de Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Manzanilla can be sold as sherry from Jerez, but only wine aged in Sanlúcar can be called manzanilla. Like other sherries, it is produced by the classic solera system of fractional blending.
Catavino: Manzanilla Sherry glass at Vinicola Hidalgo 
Gerry Dawes Copyright 2008
So fickle is nature in the production of manzanilla, that not all bodegas in Sanlúcar are capable of producing it and even in some bodegas that do produce it, there are areas in those bodegas in which manzanilla can not be produced. The big, airy, above-ground bodegas in the barrio alto of Sanlúcar have a number of doors and windows which can be opened to let in air from the ocean side of the bodega or can be closed off if there is too much heat. As with finos, the best producers of manzanilla use only free-run juice. After fermentation the mosto (must) becomes mosto-vino, then alcohol is added to bring it up to 15 - 15.5%. It then goes into 500-liter botas (butts), which are filled only 2/3 full, for ageing in large, airy, high-ceiling bodegas.
The special yeast which makes sherries of the fino family possible grows on top the wine in these partially fillled barrels and is called flor, literally flower, because it resembles the white flowers that grow near the surface of streams. In actuality, it looks like cottage cheese floating on top the wine. Because Sanlúcar is on the humid Atlantic, flor, which needs humidity, grows all year round on the surface of the wine in the manzanilla bodegas, while in Jerez in mid-summer and mid-winter, yeast growth can be severely retarded and the yeast will even submerge, exposing the wine to slight oxidation.
Since the flor does not disappear from manzanilla and the wine has no contact with air, it is the finest, lightest bodied sherry, and is the palest, usually a green-tinged color not unlike that of a fine Meursault. The poniente winds, the westerlies, bring a salt-laden sea breeze and give a light touch of salinity to the wine.
Manzanillas are aged a minimum of five years, which in practice means, that since the five year aged wine is fractionally blended with older wines in the criadera system, they will be five-seven years old, in the case of manzanillas finas, 7-10 years old in the case of manzanillas maduras, and 10 years or more in the case of manzanillas pasadas. While fino sherries in Jerez in a solera may be racked, never fully, just drawn down by quantities equal to a third of the capacity of the wine, maybe five to six times before the reach the bottling stage, manzanillas may be go through 14 rackings in the same period.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
A Tale of The Alhambra: Moonlight, The Moorish Baths & A Cigarette Lighter
by Gerry Dawes ©2008
In the depths of La Alhambra, Robert struck the flint wheel of the Zippo lighter his uncle had given him when he left for his Navy tour-of-duty in Spain. In the lighter's flame, the walls of the old Moorish baths were bathed in a warm glow and the water in the bathing basins reflected the flickering yellow light. With the glow of the light, Robert, Julia, and Paul Andrews, a Baltimore doctor touring Spain, momentarily lost the spooky sensations they had been feeling as they stood in darkness, which was pierced only by the filtered light of the full moon as it passed through the glass covering the small eight-pointed star-shaped skylights of the 14th-Century baths.
Adding to the escalofriante (spine-tingling) air of being down in this old place, at night, in the dark, was the fact that what they were doing was totally illegal and they were doing it in national monument in Generalisimo Franco's Spain. And they were lighting their way only by a cigarette lighter, which quickly got too hot to hold, and was running low on fluid. Robert gingerly flipped the top on the lighter and light went out. Juggling it in his hands he laid it on the edge of one of the baths to cool.
It might have been spooky down there, but, what an adventure they were having, clandestinely exploring sections of the Alhambra that were closed to the public at night! Along the way, before they had reached the baths, they had stood in the shadows, watching as a few people shuffled through the lighted sections that had been approved for the night tour.
It was a wonderful May night. The sky was clear and there was a full moon. The cool blue-white moonlight washed over the old Nasrid fortress, which takes up a whole ridge above the magical old city of Granada. Someone had told Paul that sometimes you could still hear nightingales singing in the Alhambra on nights of the full moon. "Maybe you will be lucky and hear them," the man had said, "they don't like pollution; it is believed that the exhaust from automobiles is driving them away."
Most of the tourists who visited La Alhambra during the day either didn't realize this was one of the two nights per week that the Alhambra was open or they simply did not want to trek back up the hill after touring all day. So, Robert, Julia, and Dr. Paul were sharing the grounds and palaces of this fantastic old Moorish stronghold with at most 20 other people and just a few guards who tended to move around as the main body of tourists moved through.
At one point in the Hall of the Ambassadors, Robert, who was familiar with the layout of the Alhambra, noticed that they were the only people in that section. He looked around for the guards and saw no one. "Follow me," he whispered to the others and moved a short white wooden picket fence-like barrier that was the only thing blocking anyone from entering the closed off areas of this magical palace. "If anyone sees us, act lost and speak only in English," he told Julia and Paul. "Pretend to be grateful that they have found us."
They crept quietly, treading carefully, walking Indian-like along the passageways, keeping to the shadows when they spotted a tourist or a guard in the lighted sections across a courtyard, whose fountains still bubbled in the night, splashing and gurgling, making the same sounds they did when this remarkable place was inhabited by the Moors back in the 14th and 15th centuries. Always in these Moorish places, there was water, the most prized liquid in world to the desert-rooted Moor. They built man-made oasises into their palaces and the sound of water was an unbroken link to the past, like music from a bygone era. There were the fountains like the one in the Court of the Lions and there were long, deep pools for ornamentation--now with goldfish--and for bathing. The pools were surrounded with hedges and palm trees. This place must have been a paradise on earth for the Moorish ruling class.
And, now Robert, Julia, and Paul had it to themselves. Robert wished that just he and Julia were sharing this magical night. Had they been alone, perhaps, on one of the benches in the Moorish baths with just the shafts of moonlight shining on them, they could have--and probably would have. . .
The sound of footsteps brought Robert out of his momentary fantasy and they saw a the glow of a light coming from around the corner at the end of the passageway to the right. Someone, probably a security guard, was coming. "Let's get out of here," Robert whispered.
Now Robert hoped he could quickly find his way back to an area where they could casually stroll around a corner into a lighted area, blend in with some of the other people and drift on out of the Alhambra, having pulled off a spectacular romantic coup, a tale that with retelling would ripen into vintage nostalgia.
They felt their way along the tunnel-like corridors, sometimes in near darkness, sometimes in filtered moonlight. At one point, it was so dark that Robert reached for his lighter, but realized he no longer had it. He must have left it at the bath, when he put it down to cool.
"Damn it," he thought, "the only thing I can do is come back in the morning, get in line early, pay another admission, and see if I can get back to the baths to retrieve it before some one finds it."
At last, feeling their way along the wall, they came to some steps that they hoped would lead them back to a place where they could blend in again in the legal zones of palace.
At the top of the stairs, Robert, stopped. "Stop! Freeze!," he whispered in the direction of Julia and Paul. "Don't make a sound."
They listened, but heard no footsteps and saw no light. Perhaps the guard had just been checking the baths, saw no one and went back the way he had come.
Then they all heard something else. They remained still and heard it again. It was the sweet song of the nightingale on a night of the full moon in the Alhambra of Granada and they had a truly magical element to add to the tale of their night in the old Moorish fortress.
Then they all heard something else. They remained still and heard it again. It was the sweet song of the nightingale on a night of the full moon in the Alhambra of Granada and they had a truly magical element to add to the tale of their night in the old Moorish fortress.
At the top of the stairs was a place that Robert knew. He silently removed the little wooden barrier and they passed back into the legal areas. Robert put his hands in his pockets and they strolled through a filigree doorway and into a lighted, arabesque-adorned hall. A guard motioned for them to hurry, it was closing time. He ushered them along towards an exit to the public grounds outside. As they rounded the corner of Palacio de Carlos V, a big, square, blocky building that was as incongruous in this graceful place as a sumo wrestler dancing a Swan Lake ballet, a flashlight-toting guard came up behind them.
"Señores, perdonen," he said, "?Es de ustedes?" He asked, holding a Zippo lighter with Robert's initials on it.
"No," Robert said, "No fumo (I don't smoke)."
"Pues, nada," said the guard, and they walked away.
The guard flipped open the Zippo, lit a cigarette and inhaled a puff from the black Spanish Ducado cigarette and, grinning, watched Robert, Julia and Paul disappear into the night.
- The End -
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Roda & Contino: Mano a Mano
For at least a decade or more, I have had a love-hate relationship with the wines of Rioja - a region responsible for some of my life's most memorable tasting experiences. I prized the best of the old guard wines (R. López de Heredia, CVNE, La Rioja Alta, Marqués de Riscal and others) - yet recognized the mediocrity of many - and grated against the brashness of a gush of new wave Riojas that left palate-scalding new oak and high alcohol in their wake. Not surprisingly, the passage of time has seen most of the stalwarts evolving toward a more modern style and many of the newcomers toning down their brash styles to a degree that moves them closer to the classic wines that made Rioja famous in the first place.
Among the most captivating of these maverick makers, Viñedos del Contino has emerged as Spain's most important "château" and Bodegas Roda as one of its most significant and innovative wineries founded in the past 25 years. Both are now at or near the top of almost everyone's list of the greatest wines of the modern Spanish era, including mine. And because each has accrued substantial track records - Contino with more than 30 vintages, Roda with more than 15 - the time is ripe to reassess their evolutions. Located in La Rioja Alavesa district, a few miles northwest of Logroño, La Rioja's provincial capital, Contino is a single-vineyard pago that produces a reserva and gran reserva, the unusual varietal Graciano and the stunning single-parcel wine, El Olivo.
Roda, a state-of-the-art winery that also embraces some notable, time-honored influences, is located next door to R. López de Heredia's centenarian bodegas in the celebrated Barrio de la Estación in Haro. Roda makes the entry-level Roda (formerly Roda II), Roda I (the bodega's flagship 100 percent Tempranillo) and the super-luxury cuvée, Cirsion (named for the thistle blossom that is the winery's logo). The genesis for this article actually came about three springs ago at the Salón Internacional de Gourmets in Madrid when Agustín Santolaya, the tall, handsome, affable general manager of Roda, made me an offer I couldn't refuse: "Come up to the winery in La Rioja after the Salón closes and I will open every wine we have made since 1992 and prove to you how great Roda wines really are."
Two years prior, I had questioned his approach to winemaking in print and he was eager to gently but firmly defend Roda's prominently proclaimed scientific approach to viticultural techniques and winemaking, and prove me wrong in the process. At least in my first encounters with Roda - and many other so-called alta expresión new wave offerings being fawned over as nuevos milagros, new miracle wines - I was not impressed. Nor was I convinced by the public relations claim that Roda wines were the "new kings" of the Barrio de la Estación in Haro, especially because its neighbors included a row of classic wineries that had always ranked among Spain's best bodegas: CVNE, La Rioja Alta, R. López de Heredia and Muga. I had come away from a tasting at Roda several years earlier with the impression that too much emphasis was placed on big, powerful, inky, concentrated wines overdosed on new oak. Its blockbuster alta expresión Cirsion offering was then pegged at around $150 (it's now $250). Santolaya's bent for winemaking by the numbers (i.e., the reliance on scientific criteria) also left me skeptical. His agro-scientist's approach to extracting the best, "phenologically" ripe - quite ripe - old vine tempranillo grapes, then making them into intense, voluptuous wines with liberal lashings of new oak, was simply unconvincing.
And I kept wondering about the "communal palate" behind the Roda wines, which seemed formulaic rather than inspired. Nevertheless, I was not going to miss a chance to taste mano a mano with the individual responsible for overseeing the wines at one of Rioja's most highly touted modern wineries, so I rented a car in Madrid on the last day of the Salón and headed for Rioja, a four-hour drive northeast. Passing through snow flurries on the way up, it was 10:30 at night by the time I arrived. Santolaya had laid out tapas and opened 21 wines - every Roda wine made since the winery's founding in 1987, except for the 1991, which was bottled but never released (the first commercial release in 1996 was from the 1992 vintage). In addition to his role since 1998 as managing director, my host is also the de facto technical director, the man who has the last word on winemaking. He was first hired as a consultant in 1992 by founders Mario Rotllan, a wealthy Barcelona businessman-wine importer (Pol Roger Champagne, Taylor Fladgate, Château Mouton-Rothschild), and his wife, Carmen Daurella (thus, Ro-Da).
Santolaya recalled that, "Mario Rotllan had a clear idea of what he wanted to do from the beginning: He didn't want to make the same wine as the great classic wineries. Rather, the idea was to look for the maximum possible expression of tempranillo in our area of La Rioja. Finding the best grapes is fundamental, then we try to get everything the grape has to give, while trying to make a wine that is elegant and not aggressive. We want wines that are fun to drink, that give pleasure with food." With that as the goal, Santolaya assembled and led a team whose first task was to painstakingly identify 100 high-quality vineyards in La Rioja Alta and La Rioja Alavesa near Haro and select 22 separate parcels from which Roda's grapes would be sourced. Through his endeavors then and later, Roda now owns 150 acres of vines and controls another 250 ranging in age from 30 to 50-plus years old and situated 1,475 to 1,870 feet above sea level. Some, like the best vineyards in Burgundy, for example, are at the limits of cultivation, which can be problematic in challenging vintages, but can produce sublime wines in favorable years. Roda also has a 60-year-old garnacha vineyard (at 2,100 feet) in La Rioja Baja used for only the basic Roda bottling.
It is Santolaya's habit to select grapes from the 17 best lots of low-yield vines (minimum age 30 years, average age 45) and vinify them separately in large, upright tinos, or wood vats. Because "it is a communal palate here," he explained, the team then blind tastes the wines to classify them. Before we settled down to taste, Santolaya took me on a quick refresher tour of the facility, where I was reminded that all wine transfers are done by gravity and I learned a maximum of 25,000 cases per year are made. First in the evening lineup was the 1992 Roda II (the lesser of the three wines made here), followed by 1992 Roda I and 1993 Roda II (no Roda I was made that year) - wines that still had some fresh acidity, but were from poor to mediocre vintages and were overwhelmed by new oak. Roda I, Santolaya said, is 100 percent tempranillo, while Roda II is usually 90 percent or more tempranillo, the rest garnacha and graciano. The 1994 Roda I (no Roda II made), from a great vintage, was riper and smoother, but still marred by oak, as was the 1995 Roda II and 1996 Roda II.
The wines began to improve dramatically with the 1995 Roda I and 1996 Roda I, which, though they were still somewhat hamstrung by new oak, also showed exceptional promise with smooth, ripe black fruit and minerals. Santolaya noted that after 1996, they began to tone down the new oak (all French, from eight different producers) a bit; they now use just 50 percent new oak for Roda and Roda I, and 100 percent new oak for Cirsion. "In the earlier years, we used to put the wines in new oak for 24 months, but we have cut it to 12 to 14 months," he explained. "The first month in new oak, when the wine is going through malolactic fermentation, gives as much oak to the wine as the next six to eight months does." Wines undergo malolactic fermentation at Roda in November (early for La Rioja) in a special room warmed by radiant heat floors. (Because the winters are cold here, if something is not done to warm the wines, malolactic fermentation will not be completed naturally until spring.)
The team didn't succeed with 1997, an off vintage; the Roda II was sold off in bulk and Roda I was thin and showed more oak than fruit. In 1998, however, both bottlings began to live up to the winery's top-quality claims; the Roda II showed rich berry fruit and round, plummy, chocolaty, ripe flavors that carried the 13.9 percent alcohol well, and the Roda I was a big, silky, but well-structured wine with loads of black plum and Graves-like mineral qualities. In 1999, another poor vintage, the wines were not successful, but in 2000, Roda hit its stride, turning out big (14 percent alcohol), voluptuous, silky, black wines with lots of rich, ripe fruit. And in the stellar 2001 vintage, which some observers believe produced the best tempranillo grapes in history, the perfect embodiment of the house philosophy was realized with big, sweet, silky, flavor-packed wines that display distinct, minerally terroir and elegance, despite the hefty - for Rioja - 14-plus percent alcohol content.
By midnight, we had tasted through 17 wines with four vintages of Roda's superstar Cirsion still on deck. Santolaya noted that Cirsion is not from a single vineyard, rather it's from the best tempranillo grapes in the best years hand-selected by a specially trained team of ten people who inspect the fruit by tasting it. "We want a wine with the highest concentration of fruit and structure," so they look for bunches that, according to Santolaya, "are already nearly wine inside the grape and bursting with ripeness with long polymerized tannin strings, not the shorter ones that can make wines harsh and brittle." Fermentation takes place in upright Seguin Moreau oak foudres and then the wine is moved into new French oak where it undergoes malolactic fermentation. It remains there for only about eight months, because Santolaya doesn't want oak to dominate. He explained that Cirsion is the result of research into the polymerization of grape tannins and anthocyans, and the judicious use of new oak is needed to "fix" them, or in Santolaya lay speak, "make a sandwich with the wood."
Such a recipe yielded big, exotic wines in 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 that showed rich, sweet black fruit, and were very silky and deceptively smooth in spite of the 14.5 percent alcohol levels. The 2001, of which only 7,000 bottles were made, was already on the market when this tasting took place in 2003. Santolaya said that it followed Roda's philosophy that a wine should be ready to drink upon release and should still live for 20 years. The jury is still out on Cirsion's longevity, but, as Santolaya intended, the wine sure grabs the taster's attention. "When you analyze the time a wine critic has to judge your wine, then divide that into the thousands of wines the critic has to taste every year, each wine gets about one minute, so your wine has to sock him in the jaw and deliver a knockout punch. You have to make him say, 'Wow!'"
In this instance, however, I had spent more than three hours tasting Roda's wines and tasted them again with the tapas later. I concluded that the wines had evolved steadily since those early efforts that I disdained. They were still more alcoholic and extracted than I prefer - big by traditional Rioja standards - but there was no denying the quality standards that went into their making. I even thought that, in some ways, they were moving closer to the more elegant style of wines like CVNE Imperial, an evolved classic from one of Roda's neighbors.
Ironically, much like Roda, the wines of CVNE's offspring, Contino, despite their power, have grown increasingly more elegant - though still richly flavored - with each passing vintage under winemaker Jésus Madrazo's hand. Established in 1973 by family members and investors from CVNE (pronounced koo-neh, an acronym for Compañía Vínicola del Norte de España), the Contino property dates to a 15th-century grant from Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. It comprises 153 acres of vineyards set on a gently sweeping slope that angles down to the Ebro River, a natural boundary that nearly encircles the property in a broad loop. On the other side of the Ebro, a high, curving, ochre-colored sandstone cliff forms a vertical barrier that, in effect, defines the bowl that Contino occupies, creating a unique microclimate. The cliff traps the heat and reflects sunlight back into the alluvial, rock-strewn property, parts of which are mindful of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Because of the topography, Contino is often rewarded with riper grapes than many other vineyards in this area, and much riper fruit than vineyards in the cooler, higher elevations around Haro.
In cool years, this warm bowl effect can be an advantage, but in very hot years, it presents its own set of problems. During an early vintage, a hot spell caused the sugars to spike to a level that produced wines that nudged 18 percent alcohol, hence no Contino was made that year. Ever since, a keen weather eye is trained on the vineyards during warm spells so that this costly experience is not repeated. Taken altogether, the vineyard's terroir normally results in wines of substantial concentration that carry between 13.5 to 14.2 percent alcohol.
Contino's first director and driving force was the now-retired José Madrazo Real de Asua, also a director of CVNE (founded by his great-grandfather in 1879), and the father of the current winemaker, Jésus Madrazo, whose mentor was the legendary CVNE enologist Basilio Izuierdo. "Contino is a warm microclimate property," Madrazo noted in a recent conversation. "
Over the past decade, Contino has begun the harvest between September 15 and 21, which makes us among the earliest grape harvesters in La Rioja. Historically, our alcohol levels range just under 14 percent. The trick is to achieve balance in the wines. If I were not a classic enologist, the wines would probably rise to 15 percent or more." The 40-year-old Madrazo, unlike most modern winemakers in Spain, grew up drinking the great, old library vintages of CVNE Imperial and Viña Real Gran Reservas from the 1940s, '50s and '60s, which set the tone for his winemaking style.
With only a few Contino vintages under his belt (his first vintage was 1999), Madrazo made the stunning 2001 El Olivo from 90 percent tempranillo (harvested from a single parcel over which a 1,000-year-old olive tree presides) and 10 percent graciano from a nearby Finca San Gregorio plot. This 2,000-case gem is undoubtedly the greatest red wine I have tasted in the so-called modern era of Spanish winemaking, which roughly dates stylistically to the early 1990s when concentration, high alcohol and lavish new French oak began to dominate. Although Madrazo espouses the virtues of new oak, he approaches it with caution: "You have to buy good oak that is not green and has been air-dried so it is properly cured," he explained. "Oak should not import any negative attributes to your wines and it must do justice to your own fruit. What works for another winery might not be good for your wines. For instance, I liked Marqués de Vargas's 1998 and 1999 wines, which were aged in Russian oak made by a Rioja cooper. I admired the balsamic flavors and the toast, so I ordered some barrels to do an experiment. The Russian oak was a disaster at Contino for the flavors I like to extract from tempranillo and my way of making wine."
New oak has its place here, just as it does at Roda. "Agustín Santolaya and I agree that when you use new oak, the quality of the fruit is paramount," he stressed. "You can't use new oak on poor grapes. We use the highest quality of grapes, which can stand up to new oak. Contino's El Olivo and Graciano both have almost 100 percent new oak, but I don't age them more than 12 to 14 months in it." For the majority of his wines, Madrazo uses a combination of French and American oak (with one percent Hungarian) with plenty of carefully main-tained used oak in the mix. Because barrels are kept a maximum of eight to nine years, no more than 10 or 15 percent new oak is usually purchased each year.
At a milestone tasting I attended last April at the Contino estate, Madrazo opened almost every Contino Reserva and Gran Reserva made since 1974 - 28 wines in all (missing were six off years when no wine was released) - for a small audience composed largely of Spanish wine critics. Also in attendance was his aforementioned predecessor, Basilio Izquierdo, who made Contino's wines from 1974 to 1998. (For the first few years, until the vinification facility was built at the estate, Contino wines were made by Izquierdo at CVNE.)
We began the modern phase of the tasting with the 1994 through the 2004 Contino barrel sample. (Because the winery became infected with TCA in the late 1980s, no wine was made in 1992 and 1993. After a four-year closure and $6 million sanitization program, a crianza was made in 1994 and 1995 that marked the return to reservas.) "Contino Reserva has to be good every year," Madrazo said, "since it has the best price-to-quality ratio, it is our bread-and-butter volume wine (8,500 to 17,500 cases per year, depending on the vintage) - the one that reaches more customers, so it has to carry the quality image of Contino always."
Even in off years, such as 1997, 2002 and 2003, Contino Reservas rate consistently well. Because new oak had to be purchased after the TCA episode, the 1994 and 1995 wines, while still lively, fruity and spicy, had still not shaken off the taste of new wood. In 1996, Izquierdo made an excellent wine, one in which sweet, ripe blackberry and blueberry fruit, toast and carob were well integrated with still detectable, but not overly obtrusive new oak. The 1998 Contino Reserva was sweet, silky and elegant. In 1999, Madrazo took over the winemaking duties and was promptly rewarded with a mid-April ice storm that was one of the worst in recent history. As a result of the deep freeze, one-third of the normal crop was lost.
Madrazo increased the French oak content to 70 percent (plus 29 percent American, one percent Hungarian) and made a very elegant wine. In 2000 and 2001 - the former vintage, good; the latter, great - the direction in which Madrazo intended to take Contino was clearly evident. Both wines showed plenty of sweet, ripe red currant and blueberry fruit, spices and reasonably restrained oak. With just 13 percent alcohol, the 2000 Reserva was very elegant and stylish; the 2001 more powerful (13.7 percent) and packed with sweet fruit, chocolate and minerally terroir. In the poor 2002 vintage, Madrazo actually made a delicious, spicy, easy-drinking wine, and he seemed to do quite well with the super-hot 2003, which was still aging in barrel.
After a break, wines from Contino's "classic" period - 1974 to 1988 (when TCA began to be detectable) - were poured. Because I have high regard for traditional, well-aged wines, I was generally more enamored of their qualities than were my modern-palate-tuned Spanish counterparts, with the exception of critic Andrés Proensa, whose scores more closely paralleled mine. Many of these wines showed typical sweet red cherry fruit with the hints of orange peel, dried rose and tea that come from aging. Because of poor vintages and the TCA hiatus, between 1983 and 1988 only the 1985 and '86 still showed reasonably well. A
lthough Madrazo is making some of Spain's great modern wines, he also turns out a throwback to the long-aging, traditional Riojas on which he cut his teeth. In very good to excellent years, he bottles (in magnum only) a sublime Contino Gran Reserva. He opened the 1996, an incredible wine with deep, rich, deliciously sweet currant and cherry fruit, great balance and marvelous complexity, for his guests. The 2000 was nearly as good, while the 2001 promises to be even better with age. He observed, "I wanted to make a wine that would recall the great classic grandes reservas that I grew up drinking - the 1964 CVNE Viña Real, R. López de Heredia Viña Bosconia 1942, for example - wines that will live for 30 years or more. I want some wine lover in the future to be able to duplicate the same experience by savoring a superb wine that is several decades old."
But Madrazo was not yet done. As a fare-thee-well gesture, the budding Rioja maestro pulled the cork on his dream wine, the 2000 El Olivo. This intensely flavored, complex, beautifully structured red finishes with a Graves-like minerality, the stamp of Contino's terroir. His 2001, from a spectacular tempranillo vintage, could well become the model for others in Spain to emulate. A January tasting at Hector Oribe Restaurant in Páganos (La Roja Alavesa) brought me up to date on the latest releases and validated what I already suspected: Contino and Roda are two of the best new-wave wineries in Spain whose recent vintages demonstrate that big doesn't necessarily mean brawny. These wines are not Arnold Schwarznegger dancing the tango in True Lies; rather, they are substantial Riojas with balance, style and even grace. More important, they are delicious to drink.
It is poetic justice that both bodegas are based in La Rioja, a region that has taken heavy flack from a few prominent Spanish wine writers who seem to favor just about any new property from the hot-country Mediterranean wine regions over almost anything produced in Spain's time-honored red wine area. The wines of Contino and Roda are living proof that tempranillo grown in the unique micro-climates and soils of Rioja's Atlantic-influenced, mountainous wine region is still hard to top when put into the hands of talented winemakers like Jésus Madrazo and Agustín Santolaya.
Tasting Bar
Through a series of events over a span of two years, the verticals that follow were tasted at both wineries, respectively, with a January 20 follow up review of the latest releases over lunch with both Jésus Madrazo and Agustín Santolaya at the wonderful Hector Oribe Restaurant in the village of Páganos in La Rioja Alavesa (also in attendance was Gónzalo Lainez, Roda's export manager, who is also a member of Peña Bilbao, one of northern Spain's most influential private tasting groups). None of the wines were tasted blind.
Bodegas Roda Roda II 2000, La Rioja Alta - $38: Pleasant nose of fruit, minerals and oak. Very smooth and balanced with integrated fruit and oak; rich black plum and chocolate flavors; smooth, silky tannins and a mineral finish. Score: 89
Roda I 2000, La Rioja Alta - $59: Fresh nose of black plum, pleasant oak and minerals. Plummy fruit flavors and silky texture with a mineral finish, this time shored up with noticeable tannins. Should improve with a few years of cellaring. Score: 91
Roda II 2001, La Rioja Alta - $38: Somewhat closed, but clean nose shows some lead pencil. Sweet, delicious and balanced, with a nice complex finish showing ripe fruit, graphite minerality and oak. Excellent. (17% garnacha) Score: 92
Roda I 2001, La Rioja Alta - $59: A gorgeous, elegant, balanced black fruit nose. Delicious, well-knit balance of ripe fruit, chocolate and minerals that fill the mouth and finish silky and seamless. Very impressive. Score: 94
Cirsion 2001, La Rioja Alta - $250: Deep, ripe black fruit nose. Very rich and exotic flavors with intense, sweet blackberry fruit laced with chocolate and minerals. So silky it glides over the palate in a smooth, voluptuous rush of fruit, so you may not notice the 14.3 percent alcohol until you have finished a glass of it. Score: 92
Cirsion 2000, La Rioja Alta - $250: Exotic, spicy nose of violets and minerals. A very concentrated "Mediterranean" Cirsion, with delicious, silky black fruit flavors and enough tannins to hold it together. For lovers of big, concentrated wines. Very nice for its weight. Score: 92
Viñedos del Contino Contino Reserva 2000, La Rioja Alavesa - $42: Integrated oak and sweet black fruit nose. Elegant, stylish and balanced with delicious, concentrated sweet red fruit, cocoa and mineral flavors, and noticeable, but harmonious oak. Opens steadily with airing. Score: 93
Contino Reserva 2001, La Rioja Alavesa - $42: Pleasantly oaky nose with sweet, ripe fruit and toast aromas. A tannic, oaky finish buttresses lots of delicious sweet blueberry and red currant with chocolate and mineral flavors. A great vintage that needs several years of cellaring. Score: 94
The four gran reserva wines listed below all need several years in bottle, but, with aging, they promise to be delicious, profound wines that show the best of the Contino estate - in fact, the best that La Rioja and Spain can produce.
Contino Gran Reserva 1996, La Rioja Alavesa - $65: Nice oak and sweet fruit jump out of the glass. Wonderfully complex and delicious with sweet ripe cherry and currant flavors along with licorice, cocoa and mineral notes; lovely finish. A modern wine that is a throwback to the great Rioja wines of yesteryear, many of which are among the greatest red wines ever produced. (Magnum only) Score: 96
Contino Gran Reserva 1999, La Rioja Alavesa - $65: Closed nose shows whiffs of ripe fruit. Rich and sweet, with cola, licorice and chocolate flavors still bound up in firm tannins that bode well for the long term. Still needs plenty of time. (Magnum only; not yet in the U.S.) Score: 91
Contino Gran Reserva 2000, La Rioja Alavesa - $135: Intense black and red fruit aromas with mineral and oak notes. Very rich, sweet, ripe, deep, delicious black raspberry fruit with carob, minerals and oak in the finish. (Magnum only; not yet released) Score: 95
Contino Gran Reserva 2001, La Rioja Alavesa - $145: Deep, ripe black fruit, black olive and oak scents. A big, sweet, rich delicious wine with good grip to hold it for the long haul. Needs several more years to develop fully, especially since it is in magnum. Score: 96
Contino Graciano 2000, La Rioja Alavesa - $95: Exotic nose of anise, white chocolate and herbs. Tart by nature, this Graciano, which is reminiscent of a Petit Verdot, needs bottle age, air and, certainly, food. The aromas in the nose carry through on the palate with more herb and balsamic flavors. Score: 88
Contino Viña del Olivo 2000, La Rioja Alavesa - $120: Ripe black fruit and black olive nose with oak integrated. Rich and very complex with stunning black fruit flavors, good acidity and great structure. Reminiscent of a great Graves, like Haut-Brion, with a long, gravelly finish. Score: 94
Contino Viña del Olivo 2001, La Rioja Alavesa - $120: Beautiful nose of ripe black fruit, minerals and toasty oak. Entry is smooth, with delicious, sweet, fresh black raspberry, toast and mineral flavors. Elegant for its 14 percent alcohol with a good acid balance and everything in harmony. Needs five to ten years; this great wine is a keeper. Score: 97 - GD
Gerry Dawes©2008
gerrydawes@aol.com
gerrydawes@aol.com
Friday, February 3, 2006
Spanish Spirits to Warm Your Soul at the Gran Café 'El Suizo' in Granada
* * * * *
by Gerry Dawes©2006
There used to be a wonderful old bar called the Gran Café Granada, located in the center of that great old Moorish city in Southern Spain. The Gran Café, known to generations of granadinos as "El Suizo," was near an equally wonderful old hotel, the Victoria, where I used to stay when I lived in Spain and would go periodically to Granada to visit the magical Alhambra and the gardens of the Generalife; the Cathedral's Royal Chapel to see the tombs of Isabel and Ferdinand and their daughter and son-in-law, Juana la Loca and Phillip the Fair; and the Sacristy, just off the Royal Chapel, where I was smitten with the exquisite beauty of Queen Isabela's superb, once-lost collection of Flemish masterpieces by Van der Weyden, Memling, and Bouts.
The Hotel Victoria disappeared some years ago, along with the slightly naughty Victorian cartoons on the walls of its bar, but El Suizo "hung on" until it was demolished for a department store, an apartment building, or God knows what. El Suizo was one of those big, bright places with lots of big mirrors, columns holding up the tall ceilings, and marble-topped, wrought-iron tables; it was like those clean, well-lighted places that Hemingway used to write about.
El Suizo had journeyman waiters with white jackets who would warm your brandy glasses for you on cold nights in February, when even the palm trees and olive groves up on the the fabled Alhambra hill would be dusted with new snow blown down from the Sierra Nevadas that tower majestically over the landscape south of town. Nothing much could ever warm your feet in Andalucia in the winter in those days; the Andalucians just simply refused to acknowledge that cold was a factor in these Southern climes, so public places (and most private ones, too), lacked central heating. But, you could heat your insides with a good shot of Spanish brandy, especially when it was warmed for you like it was by the waiters at the El Suizo.
On this occasion, a well-heeled friend from America was inviting us to the best, so we each chose a different top-of-the-line Jerez brandy to compare. We ordered the smooth, well-balanced Carlos I (Primero) from Domecq, the paler, elegant Lepanto from Gonzalez-Byass, and the dark velvety Gran Duque de Alba.
Our waiter at the El Suizo came to our table bearing a tray with steaming demi-tasse cups of strong, black Spanish café, and three brandy snifters filled with piping hot water, each topped with a cloth napkin. The waiter took the snifters one at a time, removed its napkin, poured off the hot water into metal pitcher, and carefully dried each glass. Then he poured a generous ration of the brandy, re-covered each snifter with a napkin, and placed them in front of us to allow the warming aromas to build to a crescendo.
I had chosen the Gran Duque. As I removed the napkin from the heated glass, the exotic aroma-laden vapors rushed out with a promise of warmth that one sip of the lush brandy soon delivered. And, although those latter-day saints, the perfectionists who continually dissect the fine art of drinking, will tell you that you are not supposed to do this to fine spirits, I will tell you that none but a Philistine could resist the ritual warming of the brandy at El Suizo on a winter's night in Granada.
The Solera Gran Reserva Brandy de Jerez denominación de origen was created to protect the sales domain of the big Sherry producers who make this fine stuff, and also to find a good excuse to promote the brandies, since the sale of spirits is vitally important to many Sherry bodegas. The denominación especifica (DE), or specific denomination, Brandy de Jerez refers as much to the method of elaboration as it does to region since most of the wine distilled for use in Jerez brandies comes from La Mancha and Extremadura, although, obviously, the brandy must be aged in Jerez to qualify for this new denominación. And it should be remembered that Brandy de Jerez does not include any of the superb Charentais-method brandies of Cataluña, nor any of the other brandies of Spain.
In Spain practically every hotel, restaurant, and bar carries a broad selection of Spanish brandies ranging from inexpensive styles made by the continuous distillation process to expensive brands produced by long solera aging and/or the French Charentais (pot-still) process. Although brandy is produced all across Spain, it is the big sherry producers of Jerez who account for the majority of Spanish brandies, and it is their brands that you are most likely to encounter both in Spain and abroad. The unique qualities of Jerez brandies come from being aged in the solera system like sherry, which not only guarantees a continuity of quality and style, it allows the young brandy to assume the characteristics of the older, more mature, stocks.
The best Jerez brandies, ranked by many experts alongside French cognac and armagnac as the top brandies in the world, are now called Solera Gran Reserva, after the method of production that requires a minimum of three years of barrel aging. Most of these fine, smooth old Solera Gran Reserva brandies, however, spend 10 to 15 years in a solera that originally may have been established up to a hundred years ago. They are sweeter, smoother, softer, and not as fiery as cognac or armagnac.
Several top brands of Solera Gran Reserva Brandies de Jerez are available in the United States. Most of these fine brandies are put up in attractive stoppered glass decanters or unusually shaped bottles packed in red felt boxes, satin-lined boxes, and even cork boxes that make distinctive, prestigious gifts for the holidays. Besides the luxury brandies, Gran Duque de Alba, Lepanto, and Domecq's Carlos I, that we drank at El Suizo, there are there are several other stellar brands to consider: Cardenal Mendoza, an exceptional brandy in a cork box; Domecq's top-of-the-line Carlos I Imperial, in a crystal decanter; Osborne's Conde de Osborne in an odd-shaped bottle originally designed by Salvador Dali; and Garvey's Renacimiento (Renaissance), a very fine, smooth old brandy from the bodega that makes San Patricio fino sherry.
- - The End - -
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About Gerry Dawes
- Gerry Dawes
- Gerald E. (Gerry) Dawes, who lives in about an hour outside New York City, was awarded Spain's prestigious Premio Nacional de Gastronomía (National Gastronomy Award) in 2003. He writes and speaks frequently on Spanish wine and gastronomy and leads gastronomy, wine and cultural tours to Spain. He has been a Pittsburgh Pirates fan since 1958 and his greatest baseball hero is Elroy Face, the "Baron of the Bullpen," who went 18-1 in 1959, still the major league record winning percentage for a pitcher--reliever or starter. * * * * * ABOUT HAROLD Harold Tipit (Bud) Davis is Gerry's oldest friend. He is now retired from his job at the Army Records Division in St. Louis, Missouri, where he still lives and roots for the Cardinals, something he has done since birth. He may be one of the most faithful and, surely, one of the most insufferable Cardinals fans alive.
A Traveller in Wines
Gerry Dawes photographing in the rain at Grans Muralles vineyard near Poblet, Conca de Barberà, Tarragona.
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