Enjoyable Everyday Wines II

I’m posting now about the inexpensive case of mixed, everyday red wines I put together as a complement to the dozen everyday white wines I talked about two posts back.

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We drink a lot of white wine at Casa Maresca, but we consume even more red. I’d guess that two out every three, maybe three out of four, dinners we make call for red wines – and since I care strongly about making the wine and food play happily together, it means I like to keep a good variety of red wines on hand. And that means, of course, reasonably priced wines, for all the obvious reasons.

Enough prologue: Here’s the list.

• Barale Barbera d’Alba 2017 Castlé
• Barale Dolcetto d’Alba 2017 Le Rose
• Bodegas Olarra Rioja Reserva 2010 Cerro Anon
• Cà Lustra di Zanovelli Marzemino 2017 Belvedere
• Centopassi Nero d’Avola 2016 Argille di Tagghia Via
• Château de Plaisance Anjou Rouge 2017 Entre Copains
• Cuvée des Galets (Côtes du Rhône) 2016
• Filipa Pato (Vinho Tinto Bairrada DOC) Baga 2017
• Oreste Buzio Freisa del Monferrato 2017
• Oreste Buzio, Grignolino del Monferrato 2017 Casalese
• Villa Sant’Anna Chianti Colli Senese 2015
• Viña Real Rioja Crianza 2015

In selecting this batch of wines, I was not trying to be experimental, to try new wines or kinds of wines I’m not familiar with. Food compatibility was the goal, and compatibility with the kinds of food we cook every day was the guiding principle of selection. Hence the preponderance of Italian wines on the list, and especially the large presence of Piedmontese wines, which I think are particularly food-friendly, and which – happily – are available in good variety in the New York area.

Barbera and Dolcetto I find are especially useful. Barbera’s medium body and high acidity make it compatible with an extraordinary range of foods, from – to choose a few random examples – asparagus frittata to tomato-based sauces to grilled sausages or even steaks, especially gamy cuts like skirt steak or hanger steak. Dolcetto is softer-bodied and far less acid, and it loves buttery sauces, mushrooms, more delicate meat – especially veal in any form.

Nero d’Avola is also medium-bodied, and on the palate feels and tastes Merlot-ish. Its strong suits are stews and brown-sauced casseroles – really any dish that isn’t aggressively sauced or spiced.

Even more useful – the utility infielder of red wines – is that perfectly named Anjou red, Entre Copains – “among pals,” which is how I envision large quantities of this wine must be drunk on its home turf. It’s 100% Cabernet franc, which is a Loire valley specialty, and this is one of most welcoming versions of it I’ve encountered. Its pleasing, soft, generic red fruit would match with anything from a good pizza on up the culinary scale to simple roasts and grilled meats. It’s practically the definition of an enjoyable everyday wine.

The Côtes du Rhône wasn’t quite that all-niches useful: By itself, it was a fairly light, high-acid Rhône, with cherryish fruit and a good finish, but it rounded nicely and gained some flesh with food, especially with cheese.

The Baga from Filipa Pato was also surprisingly soft on the palate and versatile with food. It stood up well, for instance, to mideastern spiced lamb meatballs and to Indian chutneys and pickles. Filipa is the daughter of Luis Pato, the acknowledged master of this grape in Portugal, and with this particular wine she has chosen a different path from that of her father’s formidable bottles.

The Grignolino and Freisa are more specialized wines that I couldn’t resist buying, since I don’t encounter them that often. Both are light-bodied, light-fruited reds ideal for warm weather quaffing, which is exactly what I’m saving them for. I should have done that too with the Colli Senese Chianti: These are always at-most-medium-bodied and fruity, with a touch of Sangiovese elegance, but this bottle was a tad too light for matching with cold weather dinners.

The Marzemino was another wine I selected simply because I don’t get many chances to taste it. This one turned out to be a big, not entirely balanced wine, black-plum fruited and a touch hot: It loved steak and mushrooms, but wasn’t too happy with anything else.

The two Riojas – Crianza and Reserva, at opposite ends of the aging spectrum – were both a bit disappointing. I love Rioja and find it very useful as a dinner wine, but of these two bottles the Reserva was too young of its kind and yet still too important for everyday utility, while the Crianza had been exposed to too much oak, which diminished its freshness and charm. I won’t give up on Rioja, however: I’ll just have to sample some others.

And there’s my necessary excuse to order some more wine. Diane, look away.

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Enjoyable Everyday Wines I

If you’re a committed wine lover and need your fix every day, it’s a great advantage to live in New York City. The variety of fine wine available is unmatched anywhere in the world, and shopping is a snap. Let it sleet and storm outside: You can sit at your desk – perhaps sipping a glass of wine – and let your search engine (Wine-Searcher is a good one) investigate for you. That’s especially handy if you know more or less the kind of wine you’re seeking.

Even handier is the search service provided by several of the larger retail shops in New York, which allows you to rummage through their entire inventory by any of several different criteria.
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I’m especially fond of one that Astor Wine and Spirits offers: searching by price range. That’s useful for any number of reasons, but I especially like that it offers me things I might not have thought of, wines outside my usual Italian and French go-to categories. We all get into ruts: This helps push me out of them. Twenty minutes of online browsing and I can put together a case of 12 different whites and another of 12 different reds at prices I like – say between $10 and $20 for everyday wines – and they will probably be delivered within 24 hours. For an aging wino, it doesn’t get much easier.
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Let me be clear: When I say everyday wines, I mean every day. Diane and I have wine with dinner every night. All right, maybe once or twice a year we have beer, but 99 times out of 100 we opt for wine – and like most people in this galaxy, we can’t afford to drink great wine every time. Not that I haven’t done my best to raise the level of our daily bottle by, for decades now, buying wines young and unready but at reasonable prices and squirreling them away for as long as I could.

Besides, it’s not just wine we care about: It’s also and especially what Italians call the abbinamento – coordinating the wine with the food it accompanies. That’s crucial to making an everyday dinner something to relish. You have to pay attention to the way the wine and the food mesh. Much as I love mature Barolo and Barbaresco, I don’t want to drink them with a dish of frankfurters and beans. It’s disproportionate – and besides, good franks and beans are estimable in their own right and deserve a decent wine that works well with them. Don’t send a Brunello to do what a Bardolino can do better, don’t open a Beaune Premier Cru where a Beaujolais Villages is what’s needed.

(Incidentally, the above examples illustrate the first principle I laid out centuries ago in The Right Wine, my book about wine and food matching: Scale is crucial. I feel even more strongly about the second principle declared in that book: Acidity is what makes a wine food-friendly. But that’s a topic for a different post. End of digression.)

Now, just what sort of everyday wines am I talking about? Well, here’s the case of white wines, all under $20, that I recently purchased, most of which I tasted first as an aperitif (we all need to keep up our strength while cooking) and then with dinner.

 

Alsace Auxerrois Leon Manbach 2017 – Very pleasant, light, but substantial enough to handle a choucroute. Nice white-flower and mineral nose, round, but with enough acidity to work with food. Quite decent.

Alvarinho Couto de Mazedo 2016 (Vinho Verde) – Very nice Albariño, crisp, fresh, aromatic: Good aperitif, fine with fish.

Alvarinho Regueiro 2016 (Vinho Verde) – quite fine: rounder and fuller than the preceding wine, more dinner wine than aperitif. Excellent with a roasted orata (sea bream).

Jean-Paul Brun Beaujolais Blanc 2017 – excellent Beaujolais producer. Nice unwooded Chardonnay, with round fruit and great freshness. Very enjoyable.

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Classic Domaine de l’Ecu Muscadet 2016 – This is a Muscadet producer I normally like very much, but this bottle was a bit of a disappointment. Drunk by itself, it tasted too much of oak. Food wiped that out to some extent, but it never rose to the level of crispness and sharpness I had hoped for.

De Cranne Bordeaux Sec 2016 – Should have been really interesting (the blend is 40% Sauvignon gris, 25% Muscadelle, and 35% Semillon), but turned out to be somewhat coarse and disappointing.

Gavi di Gavi Podere Merlina 2017 – Not a big, round Gavi, but a lighter-bodied, mineral-inflected example, with a marked and enjoyable citrus bite. Fine as aperitif and with lighter fare.

Meyer-Fonné Alsace Gentil 2016 – A lovely Alsace wine, so floral that the initial taste seemed German, but it rounded beautifully with a pheasant pâté and roasted chicken thighs.

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Ribolla Gialla Ronchi di Cialla 2017 (Friuli Colli Orientali) – quite fine and characteristic. Stood up beautifully to a choucroute garnie, and I don’t know how much more you can ask of a white wine.

Rioja Blanca Real Rubio 2017 – A bit disappointing: old-fashioned, slightly oxidized white, not unpleasant but with no charm.

Timorasso Colli del Timorasso Ricci 2014 – A lovely light Timorasso, soft-bodied but with sufficient acid; floral aroma and delicate palate of dry pear and apricot. Very enjoyable.

Weszeli Grüner Veltliner Langenlois 2017 – Very good and characteristic Grüner, with nice balance, body, and minerality. Partnered quite nicely with Chinese dumplings and home-made egg foo young. Bright, light on palate.

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I grant you that this is not an earthshakingly exotic list of wines: Had I wished, I could have cast a much wider net. But these are the kind of wines I like, so this time around I stuck with them. Others, of course are free to be as experimental as they wish: There were 88 other wines on the list I was choosing from. Have fun!

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One Fine Wine: Lopez de Heredia Rioja Viña Bosconia 2005

“One Fine Wine” is an occasional series of short posts about individual wines I’ve enjoyed recently.

I love traditional-style Rioja. At its best, it combines a pleasing rusticity and directness with subtlety and sophistication, a pairing as hard to resist as its characteristic balance of tannin and acidity, dark berry-ish fruit and earthy, forest duff aromas and flavors. In addition, traditionally made Riojas seem to have the capacity to age effortlessly, a trait that, for someone who enjoys the character of mature wine as much as I do, makes Rioja a constant pleasure.

All those qualities seem to be the gift of the Tempranillo grape, the variety that is Rioja’s main component – in the case of this 2005 Viña Bosconia probably around 80%. Bosconia is one of Lopez de Heredia’s two reserva wines (the other is Viña Tondonia). It tends toward a fullness, almost a lushness, of style and mouth-feel. This bottle was perceptibly soft, and it accommodated itself beautifully to the dishes we rather unconventionally matched it with.

Viña Bosconia – indeed, most Rioja reservas – are usually paired with roast meats and assertive cheeses. We drank ours with an onion-sweet Spanish tortilla and with a luscious, rich braise of octopus, potato, and red bell pepper whose sauce was its own juices deepened in color and flavor by a generous infusion of pimentòn agridulce. That was a whole spectrum of flavors, yet every component of those dishes meshed wonderfully with this big, yet restrained red wine, and the interplay of all the flavors remained vivid and attention-grabbing from first bite to last.

Lopez de Heredia has been a pillar of Rioja wines from its foundation in 1877, and it still makes its wines in the time-honored Rioja manner. That means very long aging in large oak tanks – five years for Viña Bosconia – and then several years of bottle aging before release.

Reservas like Bosconia are made only in the best years: The vintage of Bosconia currently on the market is, I believe, 2006. Our bottle of ’05, although delightful, was nowhere near its full maturity, which I would guess is still 10 years in the future. I hope I can keep my hands off a few bottles long enough to taste them then. For that matter, I hope I’m still around to taste them then – and, oh yes: you too.

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A Quick Report on Spain

While I wasn’t in Spain on a wine trip, I didn’t – of course – stop drinking wine, or at least trying to. Which didn’t turn out to be as easy as you might think, in the nation that boasts the world’s largest acreage of vineyards.

Old head-trained vines in Extremadura

 

We were staying in mostly simple rural hotels and eating at mostly simple rural cafes and restaurants – it was a birding trip, after all – where wine lists were brief (occasionally nonexistent) and concentrated on very local wines. Most of the people around us were drinking beer and soft drinks (Coca Cola seems to have Spain in thrall), even when – as we discovered is quite usual in Spain – wine is included in the price of the meal.

On some occasions, this was completely understandable. We had one or two meals where the local wine on offer gave plonk a good name. We also had two or three occasions when we were able to get quite good wines. But most of the time it was pretty ordinary stuff, drinkable and pleasant but in no way memorable. So there will no great revelations here (I’m at least as disappointed as you are), just a brief recounting of the most interesting bottles we hit upon.

Oh! One surprise, before I get started: Sherry is now next to impossible to find in Spain. I remember that in the past it was ubiquitous, and even simple bars offered a choice of finos, plus a manzanilla and/or an amontillado, with usually a PX lurking somewhere among the bottles. But not now. We hit upon the occasional fino, and once a manzanilla, but that was it for Sherry. We’d gotten better choices on our Iberia flights than we did in the rural parts of the peninsula.

The most widely available wine we found was, not surprisingly, Rioja, and we were pleased to drink it when it was offered. Several producers were not familiar to me (which was predictable), and the most widely available of the bigger, regularly imported producers was the ever-reliable Cune. A Cune 2007 Riserva was the one of the two oldest wines we drank on the trip – very enjoyable, with real elegance and restraint. Most wines were considerably younger, with four- or five-year-old Crianza Rioja serving as the major mature wine on most of the simple wine lists we saw.

 

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The Parador de Cervera, in the Castile and Leon region, provided the one significant exception: a lovely bottle of Rioja Riserva 2008 from Remelluri. A little post-trip research revealed that this was a truly traditional producer, whose 140 hectares of vineyards straddle the Rioja Alevesa and the Rioja Alta. Its Rioja Riserva contained not just Tempranillo but also Garnacia and Graciano, plus the white grapes Viura and Malvasia. This is – or was – the traditional kind of mixture of grapes that made Rioja, just as Chianti used to contain a mixture of white grapes and local red varieties beyond Sangiovese. I am happy to report that it made a very, very elegant wine, serene and harmonious – the best wine of our trip.

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White wines presented a much more mixed picture. Where Tempranillo was the ubiquitous, workhorse grape variety among reds, no single variety dominated among the whites. We had some decent and some indifferent Albarinos and Verdejos, as well as a number of whites blended of local varieties either unnamed or indecipherable on the label. Some of these latter showed a touch of fresh citric fruit and minerality, some were just blah.

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The best of the whites, for freshness, pleasing, racy fruit, and consistent enjoyability, were unquestionably those fermented from a grape the labels called Macabeo. This turned out to be another name for the grape most of us know better as Viura. I was familiar with it from Catalonia, where it is blended into Cava, as well as being vinified and bottled solo. It appears to be the most popular white grape in the Rioja region also, which means that, with those strongholds in the northwest and southeast of the country, Viura/Macabeo amounts to the most widely available white wine in Spain – which is a fine thing, since it makes so pleasing a wine.

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Finally, I need to say a word about Spanish brandy. Spanish brandy looks and tastes very different from French: usually darker and sweeter, often with a slightly caramelized edge. It’s not what I want every day, but it follows a large Spanish dinner very well – and dinners all tend to be large, so we had recourse to it more often than we expected during our stay.

There are two chief kinds, both very fine: Sherry-based brandy – Brandy de Jerez – and brandy from, and based on, Malaga. Sherry is self-explanatory, but Malaga may need some introduction. The Sherry region lies northwest of Gibraltar, while Malaga lies about the same distance northeast. Its rich, dark dessert wine, made from Pedro Ximénez and a variety of Muscat grapes, used to be quite famous, but went even more deeply than most into the eclipse that the world’s great dessert wines endured. Lately, Malaga shows some signs of reviving as a wine, but it has never lost favor as the source of some of Spain’s best brandies. We enjoyed both kinds. Of the Jerez brandies, our favorites were Cardinal Mendoza, Gran Duque d’Alba, and Lepanto. Of the Malaga brandies, our hands-down favorite was 1866, which is a great brandy by any measure.

P.S. Diane’s blog has a post about some of the things we ate in Spain.

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The Case of Wine

A post or two back, in the course of celebrating Chateau Gloria, I waxed nostalgic about my long-ago teaching myself wine by drinking through a mixed case that a knowledgeable retailer put together for me. Shortly after writing that, I received an impressive solicitation – from The Wall Street Journal, no less – to try a steeply discounted 15-bottle case (?!) of wine and  sign up for regular future shipments. “Some of our favorite wines,” the letter said of them: “High-quality, low-production specials” – “the inside track to the world’s smartest wine buys.”

Intrigued, I went on line to the Journal’s wine website to find out more.

 

What I found is that WSJ has entered competition with wine retailers, and it seems to be bottom-fishing, looking for wine novices who can be told that some fairly ordinary wines are really prestige items. The newspaper sponsors numerous wine clubs and even more sales items, all marked by the kind of this-is-the-greatest-whatsis-you’ll-ever-see hype that my generation used to associate with sleazy used-car salesmen. A bit of a shock to (probably naïve) me, who always associated WSJ with the higher reaches of capitalism (though clearly that has become a contradiction in terms).

Undaunted, I read on. Who exactly were the guys whose favorite wines were being offered to me was never made clear, nor was the rationale for a 15-bottle case, since it contained only 10 different wines. The red wine collection (you could choose red, white, or mixed) contained the following wines:

• an Argentinean Pinot noir
• a Rioja Riserva
• a red Bordeaux
• a California Cabernet
• a Côtes du Rhône
• a Chianti (2 bottles)
• a Chilean Malbec (2 bottles)
• a Languedoc Cabernet (2 bottles)
• a Gran Riserva “Tempranillo Cabernet Sauvignon” (2 bottles)
• a “Nero di Troia” (2 bottles)

As an introductory lot, that’s an odd selection, to say the least – a non-Burgundian Pinot noir, 3 or 4 (or is it 5?) Cabernets, and as the second wine from Italy, the fairly recondite variety better known as Uva di Troia.

The specifics of the wines grow more bizarre still. The Riserva and Gran Riserva are all of 8 years old (both 2006 vintage), fairly young by Spanish wine standards, and nowhere near the maturity they need to show what Spanish riserva is all about. The very young Chianti (2013) is conspicuously not a Chianti Classico, and exactly what its region of origin may be is not specified, though it is described as a “Tuscan Maestro’s Prized Chianti” – the maestro in question being one Paolo Masi, whom I know primarily for decent but not spectacular Chianti Rufina. The equally simple red Bordeaux, which could be made up from grapes of several varieties grown anywhere within the huge Bordeaux appellation, is billed as “Big Name 2010 Bordeaux” from J. P. Moueix:

Christian Moueix for 38 years was in charge of $3,000-a-bottle Chateau Petrus – perhaps the most sought-after Bordeaux of all. Today you’re invited to enjoy his Private Reserve from blockbuster 2010.

If that isn’t deliberately misleading advertising, then there is no such animal. “Private Reserve” is just a meaningless commercial name without either legal standing or descriptive accuracy. The wine in question is in essence a simple shipper’s generic red Bordeaux, pretty much the lowest common denominator of wine from the area. The rest is piffle.

A parallel instance: A full-page ad in a Wednesday Dining section of the New York Times puffs a wine-rating app from The Wine Spectator to “help you choose the perfect wine.” “Are you getting advice you can trust?” the ad asks; well, “300,000 ratings and tasting notes . . . from your friends at Wine Spectator” will take care of that.

As Mad Magazine used to say, Aaaarrrggghhh!  Give me a break! There is no such thing as “the perfect wine.” As I argued decades ago in my book, The Right Wine (where I learned never to use an ironic title), there are many wines that can be right for the occasion and for your palate, but “the perfect wine” is a chimera to intimidate novices. And what good are any number of tasting notes (300,000? Really?) if they don’t match what your palate experiences? They taste wild gooseberry, you taste asparagus: Who’s right?

There’s no point beating a dead horse, so I won’t go on with this, except to say that for me these sorts of things epitomize everything that is wrong with the hyper-commercialized world of contemporary wine. They are misleading at best, and can conduct people curious about wine into total dead-ends, leaving them thinking that the wine they’ve just drunk, which they found ordinary or distasteful, is actually A Great Wine – and therefore that maybe wine isn’t for them after all. Wine enjoyment doesn’t come from “big names” attached to little wines or from somebody else’s elaborate tasting notes: It comes from finding out what your palate can discern and what you enjoy. The rest is piffle.

Color me an old curmudgeon, but I much prefer – and still believe in the validity of – learning wines by judging them according to your own standards, not somebody else’s overwrought opinions. Eons back, in my book Mastering Wine, I tried to help people do that by presenting some reasonable tracks for understanding wines by tasting them in pairs. Many of the particulars of that book are now dated, but the learning method remains rock solid. Tasting in pairs is the surest way to learn wines and to shape your own palate. It doesn’t matter how little you know about wine or how limited a vocabulary of scents and flavors you may start with: Put two wines side by side, and you’ll always notice some difference between them – and you’ll probably like one better than the other. That small something will give you your point of entry, the thin edge of the wedge that will let you open up the whole world of wine.
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If you’re a novice (and things like the WSJ Wine Club seem aimed at the insecurities of novices), start broadly and start classically, because that’s where you’ll most easily see the biggest differences. Don’t begin with a California Pinot noir, which might taste of anything (sometimes even Pinot noir). Start with a decent red Burgundy of a not rarefied level – say a Côtes de Beaune – and taste it against something else equally characteristic. A small-château Médoc or St. Emilion, an inexpensive Langhe Nebbiolo, a simple Rioja, a Chianti Classico: Any of those would do because each has an identity of its own, so that the differences you’re bound to perceive between any two of them will teach you about both. And take notes, because the first few times you won’t remember what you’ve tasted: Aromas and flavors are fleeting, which maybe is why we pursue them so ardently.

Once you’ve got that initial round of tastings under your belt or over your palate, the rest is easier, though it can be more expensive. Either look into more pairs of the kind of wine you preferred from the first pair, or step up a quality level with the next pair. Try a Burgundy Village wine – a Nuits St. Georges or a Pommard – and a non-cru Barbaresco or Barolo, for instance. Just pay attention to what’s going on in your nose and mouth, to the aroma and taste of the wines, and continue to take notes. If you can make yourself focus (and for many Americans, paying attention to what they’re eating or drinking seems almost unnatural), you’re well launched on your way to understanding and enjoying wine. There is a whole world of grape varieties and wine styles ahead to explore as much or as little as your pleasure and budget will allow.

Just don’t let alleged prestige or hype or other people’s opinions (including mine) sway you: As I’ve said often in this blog, you taste only with your own mouth, and you can learn wine only with that same instrument. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it’s no match for the tongue.

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Rediscovering Three Spanish Wines

This post should really be called “The Blessings of Bad Bookkeeping.” Rummaging around in the mini-storage unit where I keep most of my wine, I discovered a case of Spanish wines – four each of a Rioja, a Garnacha, and a Jumilla – that I had meant to drink years ago. I had originally squirreled them away only because I had no room for any more wine at home. The wines – an ’01, an ’02, and an ’03, all non-riservas – were clearly meant for short-term keeping and drinking young, but once out of sight I promptly forgot about them. (Don’t try to tell me you’ve never done it.)

When I happened upon the case a few weeks back, I immediately brought it home, but not with any high hopes. Rather, I thought there was a better than fifty-fifty chance that the wines were all dead or dying, way past their prime. Well, the good news is I was very wrong: All three wines are drinking deliciously, with plenty of vitality left. Granted, the great burst of fresh fruit that had been their initial attraction had faded and been replaced in each case by a different medley of mature fruit-and-earth flavors – but that was and is fine by me: I love mature wines, and these three now fit that description. Sometimes our ineptitudes work for us: not always, not even often, but when it happens it can be very nice indeed. Here are the wines and what little I know about them.

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Allende Rioja DO 2001  

How can you not like Rioja? I think of Riojas as a lot like Chianti Classico: a traditional wine, made from a traditional blend of grape varieties, charming to drink young, yet – as this bottle showed – capable of aging gracefully and well. We drank this with grilled lamb chops, with which Rioja always collaborates beautifully.

Miguel Angel de Gregorio, the owner of Allende, is regarded as an innovator and modernist in the Rioja, and this vintage of his wine may well be made from 100% Tempranillo rather than the conventional blend, and may have been subjected to the usual modernist regime of Tronçais and Allier barriques – but you wouldn’t know it from its now-13-year-old package of flavor, which is gentle and harmonious in the classic style of traditional Rioja. The estate is located in Rioja Alta and cultivates the usual mix of varieties: Tempranillo chiefly, with Graciano, Malvasia, Garnacha, and Viura.

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Juan Gil Jumilla DO 2002

A large, family-owned estate, planted in old-vine Monastrell and newer vineyards of French varieties. My bottle was 100% Monastrell, for which the Jumilla DO is famous (at least in Spain). Monastrell is probably more familiar to most American winos as Mataro or Mourvèdre: Despite the proliferation of names, these all appear to be the same grape, and eastern Spain, around Valencia, where the Jumilla DO is located, appears to be its ancestral home. Jancis Robinson describes it as a “high-quality, heat-loving dark-skinned variety most valued for its heady, structured contribution to blends.”

Juan Gil’s Monastrell undergoes what appears to be a combination of traditional practices and modern treatment: long skin contact – 25 days – and then small French wood for a year. Once again, the wine, at more than a decade old, didn’t taste of oak, but of mature fruit – dark, just-going-pruny flavors, with a lot of earthy/mushroomy notes. Not too big: medium-bodied, in what Italians would call rustico-elegante style – meaning a little bit country style, but far from a bumpkin.

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Borsao Tres Picos Garnacha (Campo de Boria DO) 2003

Bodegas Borsao is essentially a large and extremely well-run cooperative, located in Aragon in northeast Spain – the so-called Empire of Garnacha. Garnacha is, of course, Grenache, probably one of the most widely planted varieties in the world. As Grenache does well in hot, arid zones, where it can produce a wine of great distinction and remarkable long life, Aragon suits it admirably, and Borsao’s low yields and tight quality controls make the most of it. Low-temperature fermentation in stainless steel and a brief excursion in oak result in a wine with abundant fruit, still showing notes of freshness and piquancy at eleven years, and with a structure of soft tannins and good acidity sufficient to carry it for at least five more years – maybe even another eleven. Like most Grenache wines, this one is very versatile with food, dealing comfortably with everything from roast chicken to a hearty chile con carne.

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So there you have it: the happy results of little digging around in storage. To paraphrase an annoying commercial, What’s in your closet?

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A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of trips, it was the worst of trips; it was sometimes a very good wine, it was never a bad one; it was sometimes a fine dinner, it was sometimes a disappointing one. Nobody wound up at the guillotine, though one of us – me! poor me – wound up the trip with some spectacular intestinal distress, of which you do not want the details. It’s enough to know that I have suffered for my art.

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Diane and I decamped from rainy, chilly New York for Barcelona and Paris at the end of September. We landed in bright sunshine and warmth and enjoyed that for our whole stay in Barcelona, before returning to rain and chill in the soi-disant City of Light. I hadn’t been in Barcelona since the Franco years. It’s a very different place now – lively, buoyant, prosperous, experiencing a strong surge of Catalan nationalism, which was reflected in sometimes unpronounceable menu entries. The Catalan language, which is widely spoken and written, is closer to Provençal than it is to Spanish, and it uses “X” – pronounced halfway between “ch” and “sh” – in unexpected places.

In Barcelona, the all-but-compulsory aperitif is cava: Spanish – excuse me, Catalan – champagne-method sparkling wine. I don’t normally get very excited about cava: Too many of those I taste here are stripped down to acidity and bubbles, with the fruit and/or minerality dropped out somewhere mid-Atlantic. But we drank many cavas in Barcelona, and they were all charming – nothing outstanding, but all pleasant. Must be the effect of the local air and the local tapas, which were delightful. With them and with our dinners we also drank a lot of Priorat and Penedes wines. Again many were charming but few striking.

The two best wines of our stay in Barcelona we enjoyed on two separate nights in our favorite restaurant, Casa Leopoldo. The red was the Riserva Especial of La Rioja Alta’s Viña Ardanza 2001. This was only the third bottling of this Riserva Especial (the others are 1964 and 1973), and I thought it a bargain at €34. An elegant, limpid wine of great depth and complexity, it matched equally well with two widely different first courses and then with a spicy, tomato-ey tripe dish and an unctuous pig knuckle swathed with wild mushrooms. Any wine that can do that has guts as well as complexity.

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We enjoyed this dinner so much we arranged to return there for our final meal in Barcelona. Elinor, head of the waitstaff, who had taken charge of us the first evening, promised us a caught-that-day John Dory – Gallo di San Pedro here. The fish was grilled magnificently and tasted fresh and rich, as were the dishes that preceded it: absolutely fresh anchovies, lightly marinated, and tiny, tiny squids sautéed with chanterelles and topped with a poached egg. The wine that matched these very different flavors was equally rich and fresh: a big, luscious white Rueda, 2010 Belondrade y Lurton Verdejo (€44, and well worth it). A 100% Verdejo, fermented and aged on the lees in 300-liter French oak, it tasted wonderfully of fruit and mineral, with the oak showing not as a flavor but as a rounding and fattening of the lean Verdejo character. A lovely meal and a lovely wine.

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For more about what we ate in Barcelona, see this post on Diane’s blog.

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Paris, alas, was another story. In part it might have been the weather, but we missed the brilliance, the magic, that so many past dinners in Paris had led us to expect.

We had decided to skip the starred restaurants: What we wanted was honest brasserie cooking – but we couldn’t find it. Maybe we chose badly, maybe we were just unlucky. Some very simple things remained marvelous – sitting at a café table and gnawing a sandwich au jambon made with that amazing Parisian baguette; one lunch of roasted marrow bones followed by a small steak frites (Diane) and a shepherd’s pie (me) at Le Petit St. Benôit, accompanied by the house’s own simple Côtes de Rhône.

But other places that we knew from earlier visits – Louis Vins, Vagenende – had moved more upscale and lost some of their scruffy charm (plus, in the case of Louis Vins, its wonderful list of Beaujolais crus, now replaced by a battery of middling Bordeaux). New places – for instance, Le Petit Celadon – that we tried turned out to be much more formal than we were hoping for: good food, very correctly served, but a more starched experience than we wanted. One new restaurant, in a total mix-up, turned out to be the very kind of thing we were trying to avoid, a Michelin two-star “restaurant gastronomique,” with all that that entails.

And I could scarcely find any older wines. That didn’t surprise me in Barcelona – but in Paris? The best bottle of the French half of our vacation was a 1996 Zind Humbrecht Riesling Clos Windsbuhl (€134) that we drank at the afore-mentioned restaurant gastronomique: Jean Francois Piège at Thoumieux. The wine was lovely, deep and resourceful – it had to be, to match with nine largely over-the-top appetizers; a main course of Brittany blue lobster, dressed with red bell pepper puree, foie gras, and eau de coco (yes, coconut water); and a selection of five cheeses cunningly presented on tall chunks of some exotic wood – not to mention four desserts.

This restaurant – the current mutation of what had been for decades a fine, family-owned brasserie – seems typical of the hot trend of restaurants in Paris and New York. The menu is essentially fixed: You get a few choices of main course, and everything else is chosen by the chef. This means that you confront a succession of elaborate small dishes which may or may not make any culinary sense. The New York Times has talked about this phenomenon recently, in its rather even-handed way. I’m not going to be even-handed: I don’t like it. I don’t want that many dishes, that many different flavors, that long at table. I want fewer dishes and more choices, so I can select a wine I enjoy to match with foods I want to eat. I can only hope this latest manifestation of star-chef egoism dies an early death, before, like Sydney Carton, I am driven to do a far, far better thing than I have ever done and give up going to restaurants entirely.

Except for places like this one in Barcelona:

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