The world is better off for places like Barcelona.  Wines such as Anima Negra AN/2 from Majorca’s red callet grape and Bodegas Palacios Cosme Palacio Blanco 1894 from Rioja’s white viura variety don’t make it onto just any wine list.  But at Barcelona Restaurant and Wine Bar, ten minutes off of I-84 in (of all places?) West Hartford’s suburban trendy Farmington Avenue retail district, they sit comfortably on a comprehensive Spanish wine list that rekindles memories of my two favorite Spanish lists in this country; Taberna de Haro in Boston and Casa Mono in New York City.

All three lists have something in common besides size and volume.  They hold pricey classic choices like Vega Sicilia, Pingus, and Clos Erasmus while featuring depth in less popular and remote wine growing regions like Bierzo, Majorca, and the Basque country. Wines of great elegance, food friendliness, and unique terroir hail from these hidden spots to challenge juicy modern garnachas, classic tempranillos, and racy monastrells. Great rewards hide beyond modern fruit driven values and classic producers for curious wine adventurers as hungry to learn as I am.  On a recent and lively Saturday evening of tapas indulgence at Barcelona, I was reminded one more time that zagging instead of zigging straight to the proven producers can pay large dividends. $110 at the restaurant bought these two magical bottles of wine. You can buy both at retail for $30 and $19 respectively

**** $30 2008 Bodegas Palacios Cosme Palacio Blanco 1894

The wine is a blend of primarily 95% viura, the most popular white variety in Rioja blancos, and then 5% malvasia. News to me, viura is the name used in Rioja for the macabeo variety, more commonly relied on in northern Spain for Cava production. I ordered this wine with memories of tasting my first white tempranillo at a Rioja tasting earlier this year.  In this case, the viura/malvasia blend showed a caramelized, lime, and honey nose with hints of toast and cotton candy to lure you in.  Most remarkably, the wine lands with amazing richness and contains an acidic linearity to provide structure and framework to the wine’s lusciousness. Cosme Palacio is co-fermented in barrel and aged in oak, but retains a bright fruit core that never yields to the wood.  This is an amazingly sexy wine because of its richness and tantalizing aromas, and its great structure gives enough balance to render it a classic choice.  I could linger over this wine all night, it’s that good.

***1/2 $19 2008 Anima Negra AN/2

I am a sucker for wines made on islands.  Call me silly, but I dream about the isolated terroir, surrounded by water, connected to no other spot. I think about the wines I have tasted from a small island off Sicily’s coast and how it is possible to imagine tasting the salt air, morning dew, and volcanic soils.  Or at least I thought I did.  So experimenting with this second wine from Majorca’s Anima Negra made from 65% callet, 20% mantonegre and fogoneu, and 15% syrah was an easy move.  The fruit is fermented in steel and then aged for a little over a year in French and American oak.  It’s a medium light ruby color, with rich and bright cherry aromas buffeted by wafts of tobacco.  The wine’s distinction comes in its weight; a softness without hard edge and a fruity lightness that appears to actually melt in your mouth. No major league forward ripeness and volume that you are accustomed to in big garnachas, just a pleasantly round and mellow mouthful of wine that is light on its feet and washes over your palate like it belongs there.  It’s a great food wine, and had enough acidity and brininess to stand up to the boldly spiced tapas that covered our table.  I am not sure I have ever tasted a wine just like it.  It has elements of gamay and pinot noir, but is not like either of them.  As the wine lingered in the glass, even some clove and cinnamon spice emerged.  It is a fascinatingly complex wine that just wants to please and accomodate your meal.  A killer value.

Wines like these keep me enthusiastic about wine discovery and realizing there is always something new just around the corner that I won’t ever believe I’ve never tried before.

Last week I paired a really ugly hamburger with an indisputably pretty wine.

Grindhouse "Killer" Burger

2003 Roagna Paje Barbaresco

The burger was just as delicious as it was ugly.  The wine, on the other hand, was as graceful, balanced, and pretty as folks have come to expect from a Luca Roagna wine.  They made magic together, an uncommon partnership between simplicity and beauty, combining an appreciation for the luxurious with a bow to the unembellished.

This wine and burger pairing eventually came to pass because I coughed seven weeks earlier, fulfilling a speaking engagement in NYC. Four discs in my lower back organized themselves in immediate protest and swiped all feeling out of my left leg and right foot while they teased a slew of spinal nerves and back muscles to their breaking points.  Those muscles and nerves became really aggravated and directed their newly stoked fierceness at me, inflicting terror-like pain and unimaginable restrictions on simple movements like walking, standing, looking sideways, raising your hand, sitting down, tying shoes, waving….you get the picture.

The discs have had the upper hand ever since, even with my crutches and canes as weapons in self defense.  My new temporary handicap has slowed me down; lot’s of home office time, wheelchairs in airports, hours of rehabilitation, and crutches for short distance walks.  I am not sharing any of this to solicit your sympathy, but instead to share some post traumatic joy from living life a little bit slower.

For all the good and bad of it, I travel around the country moving 500 mph every day of my media career. I believed I was at least sniffing (if not smelling) the roses all these years. But planes move too fast for that, fine restaurants’ food and wine parades overwhelm it, rental cars smell way too musty, hotels waft antiseptic, meetings and speaking engagements wreak of coffee and bad take-out food, and pinnacle moments of business victory smell more like spilled blood and prized carcasses than the pleasant sweetness of delicate roses.

It was surprising that in the middle of their torturous reign of terror, my angry discs would help me smell the roses; simply by keeping me housebound and quiet. I reengaged with the simple things that happen in families and homes every day, and that all started to smell a whole lot more like roses to me.

So on this Tuesday evening in Atlanta, during my discs’ first week of travel since that dreaded pre-Labor Day cough, I needed to lay low and hold onto my new and slower pace.  It meant that a top Atlanta hamburger from Grindhouse “Killer” Burgers and a good bottle of wine from Tower Spirits would make a perfect quiet dinner back at my apartment. I would be miles away from a big steak and crowded dining rooms of Atlanta’s top business eateries.

I ordered my favorite Grindhouse combination; double patties of dry aged chuck & brisket, lettuce, american cheese, grilled onion, pickles and secret grindhouse sauce. These hamburgers only occasionally make it into the top ten Atlanta burger debates that mostly include Holeman & Finch, Flip, Vortex, Farm Burger, etc.  I like Grindhouse best.  They are mushy and decadent, reminding me of the Shake Shack burgers I used to eat with my oldest son in Madison Square Park after his shift ended across the street in Eleven Madison Park’s kitchen.  Both burgers just slide down and are mostly about texture and sauce.

Before picking up the burger, I snagged the ($55 ****1/2) 2003 Roagna Paje Barbaresco, made from south facing slope fruit of the Paje vineyard. The Roagna family has been making wine since the mid 1800′s in Barbaresco, and now owns pieces of top vineyards around town. The fruit macerates for months in wood vats before aging in French oak over four to six years before bottling and further aging prior to release.  This is their entry level Barbaresco, but in this vintage no Riserva was made so the fruit normally reserved for the top blend probably found its way into Paje. The wine’s sweet fruit aromas combine with mint, char, herbs, and anise.  Deep fruit sweetness wraps itself in regal silk, supported by tannins that are noticeably friendly and uncharacteristically soft, letting the wine linger with grace before leaving its authoritative finishing signature that makes it impossible to forget. The wine is indeed majestic, and Roagna is a producer to follow. Every sip of this wine had me closing my eyes to better focus on its intense balance, elegant texture, riveting flavors, and ethereal aromatics.

I took note of the moment inside my sparse Atlanta pied-à-terre, eating something as simple as an ugly burger while experiencing a wine as monumentally beautiful as a Roagna Barbaresco.  And while…

 …it might have been coincidence, characteristics of the vineyard, or just righteousness—- THE WINE SMELLED LIKE ROSES  

In a familiar way, I relished the simplicity of sitting at an apartment countertop and quietly enjoying a good burger and bottle of wine without any other competing agendas.  I was smelling the roses once more, just like back home over the last six weeks.  I have my discs, Roagna, and Grindhouse to thank for this special gift.  Avoid my path of the angry discs, but definitely check out Grindhouse and Roagna Paje Barbaresco 2003.

I’ll admit to spending more time than it’s probably worth thinking about nuances in wine and food culture.  For example, I ponder how obvious it is that most of us Americans act with righteous self confidence buying, ordering, and cooking the foodstuffs and ingredients we prefer. We’ll ask questions freely when shopping or ordering to make sure a dish or ingredient lines up with our palates’ preferences. Conversely, I am consumed by “knowledge gap” insecurities that loom large around restaurant wine lists and retail shelves. We tend to get embarrassed that we don’t know enough and fear asking the questions that might reveal these insufficiencies.

People I eat with know I think about wine a lot and regularly delegate the decision about the wine they will drink with dinner to me. How come this happens with wine but not food? Dinner companions don’t funnel all their food menus my way. They are confident enough to pick dishes and ask questions that help fill in blanks about preparation. Ordering food in a restaurant is as easy as brushing your teeth, but juxtaposed with the trauma of ordering wine it turns into one bookend of a cultural culinary divide.

We eat multiple times a day but wine is a minuscule piece of our diet. According to the Wine Market Council, the average American drank a bit over 11 litres of wine during the last twelve months.  Compare that to the idea of “wine as food”, a steady piece of the European diet where there is an absence of anxiety ordering a glass of Cotes du Rhone, Muscadet, or Bandol with lunch or dinner.  Continental Europeans, Brits, and Aussies more than double per capita US consumption.  This idea of “wine as food” stems way back, something I was reminded of when I read this at CliffordAWright.com (a great resource, by the way, for Mediterranean food and wine culture):

Languedoc, the region to the west of Provence, shared many alimentary parallels with Provence, especially the prevalence of bread and wine in the diet. In his study of the peasants of Languedoc during the last third of the fifteenth century, the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie compared the diet of the farmworkers of Narbonne to the bourgeoisie of Beziers, using household accounts. The bourgeois family of Beziers, the Rocolles, consisted of a widow, her two daughters, and a female servant. The four of them consumed about two thousand liters of wine a year. Again, as in Provence, we see that wine was food. The Narbonne farmworkers drank even more, about 650 liters of red wine a year per person. The farm workers were not demanding, insisting only on money in the pocket, white bread on the table, and a glass of good wine.

That was 60X more wine than the average current day US consumer, and 180X the average US per person 1970 consumption rate. The frequency of consumption in the European diet demanded an uncomplicated approach to wine.  Is there really any question whether the low rates of consumption and immersion are top differentiators between food confidence and wine phobia in the US?

Jonathon Alsop

I still wonder about how this US culinary divide perpetuates itself.  One interesting question to ponder is how it came to be that restaurants distribute only one wine list per table.  This point only surfaced last night sharing a few bottles of old wines with Jonathon Alsop, founder of the Boston Wine School.  Jonathon is a pretty grounded guy, carrying tons of wine knowledge that he shares in a remarkably matter of fact, uncomplicated fashion.  I never fail to spend even five minutes with Jonathon and not realize an hour later that I learned something new without ever having noticed being taught.  I shared my interest in this concept of “food as wine” with Jonathan and will attempt to paraphrase his reaction as best as I can:

Think about this, why do restaurants continue to present only one wine list per table?  Do they think only one person is capable of ordering wine?  Is there one person who has more knowledge than anyone else at that table?  Is there a ranking of knowledge that the restaurant expects all their guests to participate in at each table?  Is everyone to pass the wine list to the oldest, wisest, whitest, richest, man to order their wine for them?  It’s insanity!”

It’s a guess, but I presume this tradition started when great restaurants with classic cellars used hard cover bound books to showcase the hundreds of pages of inventory.  You can still find something like this at Tour D’Argent, for example, where a small stand is placed next to your table to rest the twenty pound tome on.  But with practically all of today’s restaurants producing a few pages of wine inventory on cheap printed paper, why not make sure everyone at the table can look at wine menus?  Isn’t this akin to giving only the smartest math student in the class a math textbook because he knows more about math than the other students, and everyone else just gets history and literature textbooks without any hope of becoming more comfortable with mathematics?

The earliest evidence of wine making and drinking goes back to Neolithic times.  National Geographic recalls Patrick McGovern’s research on ancient wine and throws a jab at the people and forces that complicated wine matters over the last 2,500 years:

Wine snobs might shudder at the thought, but the first wine-tasting may have occurred when Paleolithic humans slurped the juice of naturally fermented wild grapes from animal-skin pouches or crude wooden bowls.  The idea of winemaking may have occurred to our alert and resourceful ancestors when they observed birds gorging themselves silly on fermented fruit and decided to see what the buzz was all about.

Serving wine and food at Per Se in New York City is anything but Neolithic and a far cry from animal skin wine vessels or crudely carved table adornments.  Phoebe Damrosch was working her way through graduate school waiting tables at this pinnacle of New York eating establishments.  She was forced to confront her total lack of wine knowledge by deferring to the sommelier.  She eventually took some lessons from him which lead to a more useful romantic involvement than deep wine savvy.  She simply cemented her crutch and reliance on him.  Phoebe had no problem having her new beau constantly visiting her tables and stepping in with the right wine talk at just the right moment.  She left the restaurant after 18 months, was still totally insecure about her wine knowledge, yet she became the go to person among her girlfriends for ordering wine in restaurants.  After all, she must know something having worked at Per Se and dated the sommelier.  Phoebe dreaded these moments and froze in front of wine lists and wine waiters, scared to reveal the gaps in her knowledge even though she had more exposure to wine than the average person.  She wrote about how she overcame her own wine list phobia in a Food & Wine piece and shared this liberating vignette of a dinner out with friends:

“Do you like red wines or white wines?” He asked me slowly, with raised eyebrows and wide eyes, as if I were very young or dim-witted. And then it hit me. I had just been pegged as a Chardonnay-with-ice drinker. This would not do.

“Give me a minute,” I said, grabbing the list. I had ordered smoked fish and my friend a salad with vinaigrette, which meant the ideal pairing would be a high-acid, low-oak white. Scanning the whites, I happened to recognize a few of the producers—Marcel Deiss, Albert Boxler—and settled on J.J. Prüm Kabinett Riesling. When I got to the reds, one jumped out at me: the Movia Veliko Rosso, a biodynamic Slovenian wine that’s a blend of Merlot, Pinot Nero and Cabernet Sauvignon. We served Movia’s Ribolla at Per Se.

I ordered the Riesling and got the standard “excellent choice,” but when I ordered the Movia, the sommelier hesitated. “Have you had the Movia before?” he asked.

Having closely observed sommeliers in their natural habitat, I recognized his behavior. This unusual wine was the sommelier’s little pet. He wanted it to go to a good home and be appropriately adored.

When the Movia was poured, and I swirled and stuck my nose halfway into the glass, the sommelier asked, “Are you in the business?”

I guess there’s hope for all of us if we challenge ourselves and stir up enough courage to experience the liberating confidence from ordering wine you think you might like to drink.

Despite spending the better part of this weekend in Ontario tasting through a couple hundred Niagara wines, I woke up this morning with ramps on the brain. Not Pinot, Riesling, or Chardonnay…..just ramps. Each spring I’ll  trip over an early seasonal ramp at some “farm to table” spot and turn fanatic securing a personal stash before the rapid wind down of ramp season. Right on cue, this weekend placed me in the middle of a full-on, Ontario style, BYO dinner at Treadwell, an absolutely serious farm to table restaurant that deserves a spot on every dedicated foodie’s Niagara wine travel itinerary. While I got focused on ramps, thirty reveling winos proudly poured from more than seventy different bottles that we all carried from hometown vineyards, favorite bottle shops, or personal wine cellars (I brought the brightly fruited and structured 2008 Avanthia Godello and a very serious 2005 Rayas Chateauneuf du Pape Reserve).

Thanks to the skilled kitchen team at Treadwell and to Rick VanSickle for snapping this shot of the the best piece of lamb I ever ate, only to be topped with my inaugural crispy, garlicky, and leafy Spring 2011 ramp:

Ramps steal my attention with their garlic character, lower-stem crispness, and edible tip-to-stem leafy greens.  They are muli-talented performers and I am obsessed by the way only one vegetable can cover all the garlic, onion, crunch, and bitter green requirements of this compelling ramp and fresh tomato pasta sauce I conjured up.  A little olive oil, butter, salt, pepper, small tomatoes, rigatoni, and parmesan completes the ingredient list of this simple yet addictive pasta dish.  Here is a photo of the finished sauce I pulled together today with my freshly secured batch of ramps:

Ingredients:

1 lb. ramps

8-12 oz. grape or assorted small tomatoes

5 tbls. really good olive oil

3 tbls. unsalted butter

salt and pepper to taste

1/2 cup grated quality Parmigiano Reggiano

1 lb. fresh (dried will also do) Rigatoni

Directions:

Clean and separate ramps, rinsing thoroughly.  Then rough cut cleaned ramps from stem to leaf tip in three to five evenly spaced chops depending on size of ramps.  Heat olive oil and butter in large saucepan over medium heat until butter foams.  Add chopped ramps and tomatoes and cook over low-medium heat until tomatoes are ready to burst, but still whole, and ramps have softened with some firmness left in the stems (the tomatoes and ramps should finish cooking simultaneously).  Mix in half the grated cheese, reserve the rest for individual service.  Finally, over low heat fold in rigatoni, prepared al dente, serving individually on white plates, topped with a couple pinches of parmesan.

The wine of choice for this evening was Alain Coudert’s 2009 Clos de la Roilette Cuvee Tardive.  Besides loving this Fleurie for its acidity and metallic mineral profile, this weather-perfect Beaujolais vintage produced a plumper, rounder, more textured wine than usual with an alcohol level approaching 14%. Clos de la Roilette’s traditionally mouthwatering saline and steely character was not lost in 2009, working so well with the tomatoes’ acidity, ramp infused garlic and onion aromatics, and rich butter and olive oil base.  It is a spot on choice and it was so refreshing reemerging from a terroir focused Niagara wine immersion weekend with a wine that powerfully defines its own old world Fleurie/Moulin-a-Vent borderline terroir.

Enjoy some tasty spring ramps while you can and if you are inclined to give this simple recipe a try, please let me know what you drink with it.  Now that my vegetable bin is brimming with a couple pounds of fresh spring ramps, I am going to refocus on organizing and sharing some observations about the energetic, young, and developing Niagara wine community I discovered before I lost my mind to Ontario’s first ramps of the season.

Eventually you find Kitchen A Trattoria discretely tucked away off a main street in St. James, Long Island.  Worth the momentary measure of driving confusion, the restaurant delivers a top BYOB opportunity to pair Long Island’s most impeccably crafted, mouth watering, rustic Italian fare with your cellar’s treasures.  Hundreds of miles from my own wine cellar, our evening featured some Txakoli from Spain’s Basque country, a Chenin Blanc from South Africa’s Swartland, and a perennial show-stopping value Cotes du Rhone from importer Eric Solomon; (***1/2 $14) 2009 Domaine la Garrigue Cuvee Romaine.

On this return visit, eight of us reveled in a meal that shook loose personal memories of stumbled-upon trattorias across Italy that once enveloped my senses and palate.  The preparations are simple, focused, authentic, flavorful, and on-point American interpretations of Italy’s best soul food. Appropriately friendly and knowledgeable servers deftly organize the small and unassuming dining room’s convivial theatrics.  Three and five course menus are a steal and combined with its BYOB policy, Kitchen A Trattoria adds up to a must visit if you are anywhere close to Long Island’s middle North Shore.

The 2009 Domaine la Garrigue Cotes du Rhone Cuvee Romaine was a perfect wine for the evening.  Recent vintages of Cote du Rhone, especially 2007, are fairly subject to criticism for embodying over-ripe, high alcohol character in lieu of their traditionally spicy, herb infested fruit flavors and aromas that chiseled Cote du Rhone’s rewarding and simple regional wine reputation in Paris and countryside bistros across France.  The current vintage of Domaine la Garrigue has taken steps to reverse the finger pointing, and provides a style of wine more closely resembling a great, top vintage Gigondas.  The Grenache and Syrah fruit going into the wine comes from Cotes du Rhone and Gigondas vineyards overseen by Vacqueyras based domain and restaurant operator Maxime Bernard.

While the wine never shrinks from it’s rich and full fruited posture that some will claim continues to represent a left turn for Cote du Rhone, it delivers a rustic nose of familiar anise, Provencal field herbs, and black peppery spice.  It is a marriage of old style Cotes du Rhone character and rich black cherry fruit.  The Grenache/Syrah blend presents a smooth, but weighty, mouth feel.  Mostly, the 2009 Domaine la Garrigue is reminiscent of the compelling drinking experiences available through much more expensive and classy Gigondas and Chateauneuf du Papes from strong vintages.  If I tasted the wine blind, I never would have guessed it was $14 and Cotes du Rhone. Its aromatic and flavor profiles combine sexy fruit, rustic spice, and flora to create a graceful enough wine experience deserving a $40+ price tag.

Buy the 2009 Domaine la Garrigue Cotes du Rhone Cuvee Romaine and book your weekend reservation, at least one week before, at Kitchen A Trattoria.  You will have two experiences where “simple and rustic” transforms itself into “classy and ethereal”.

Tip: Ask them to replace the wine glasses on your table with the stemless water glasses.  They are much better vessels for the wine you tote along.