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.

Drawing up the perfect attack on a classic restaurant wine list creates the same adrenaline level NFL coaches experience prepping for Sunday games. At least it seems that way; it’s both exciting and nerve wracking knowing one or two calls can define a dinner’s outcome. Planning is required. Have we worked with the restaurant’s wine list before?  What language can we use with this particular sommelier to trigger the right personalized advice?  Are we value or treasure hunting? Older or new releases?  Hard to find limited production wines or a repeat favorite known to please?

At dinners with a bunch of wino comrades, debating and decision making are as much a part of the evening’s fabric as any other stage of the meal. Other nights involve guests less willing to sacrifice time and brain cells debating wine selection. Last week at Veritas (oenophile nirvana) with Dan, I found myself somewhere in the middle.  We had a significant amount of news to catch up on, but the wine was equally important to both of us.  I had not worked with the Head Sommelier Rubén Sanz Ramiro before so I did not feel comfortable enough turning the entire experience over to him nor burying my head in the epic Veritas wine list for twenty minutes.  Here is the game plan I followed:

Proven White Wine Value: Kick-Off

We needed something to drink immediately, but didn’t want to trump our early catch up conversation with solitary wine list huddles.  Nor did I want to rush into a big up-front cash investment without enough time to think things over.  Not having established rapport with the sommelier yet, delegating was off the table.  I turned to the Loire section and quickly ordered the **** 2010 Huet Clos du Bourg Sec.

Our Boston tasting group had just conducted a blind tasting of Loire Valley chenin blancs and this Vouvray was my favorite.  It jumped off the list as an easy choice for the straight forward enjoyment and palate awakening I was hoping to quickly uncover.  While the “sec” designation is true to the wine’s overall dry nature, there is enough residual sugar framed by significant acidity to qualify it as a shoe-in for a pleasing start to the evening.  The later vintage did not disappoint with familiar steely notes, hints of background sugar, grapefruit and lemon meringue delivered in a round and luscious mouthfeel, chalk, and a crisp finish.  It’s a go to wine, and one that didn’t break the bank at roughly $70 on Veritas’ not-so-cheap list.  While we had a long game ahead of us, it was a perfectly designed kick-off play.

Cellared But Not Tried: Third Quarter Audible

With the dinner unfolding and middle courses arriving, this was no time to fool around.  I called time out and spent three minutes on the sideline scanning the list.  Without leaving the Loire section, I stumbled upon the ***1/2 2007 Clos Rougeard Les Poyeux.  I am an admitted sucker for Clos Rougeard, had tasted the already immediately enjoyable 2007 Saumur Champigny, but wondered if the Les Poyeux would provide as much immediate accessibility.

The wine also sat in my cellar and this was the perfect chance to check it out without draining my limited 2007 Clos Rougeard stockpile. Not wanting to waste too much more time with the list, I went with it.  I called for a producer that always knocks me to the turf.  This particular cabernet franc made by Rougeard’s Foucalt brothers showed trace hints of its truffle and licorice bones, but remained seriously tight all the way through to the end of the bottle.  It never opened up.  The wine seems like it will stay closed down for at least several years to come.

While the move informed delaying future 2007 Les Poyeux drinking, it did not do as much for our dinner.  It was a win/lose; I should have consulted the sommelier.  With just one question about its approachability (admittedly, a doubt I quietly pondered) he would have known the wine style I leaned towards and could have dealt a more accessible alternative.  Live and learn; turnover.

Consult Sommelier, He Understands Me Now: 4th Quarter

Rubén agreed the wine was too tight to really appreciate.  But, we went to school on that experience together and now had the beginnings of mutual understanding.  I asked him what he would drink next if he wanted something similar, but at the peak of its development.  He suggested the ****1/2 1998 Bois de Boursan Chateauneuf du Pape Cuvee des Felix.  I knew ’98 to be a prodigious year in Chateauneuf du Pape but had never heard of the Cuvee des Felix blend.  It turned out to be the first Cuvee des Felix vintage.  Rubén assured me this Boursan held the style I had probably hoped for with the Clos Rougeard, and was perfectly ready to drink now.

Touchdown!  The Boursan was a massive mouthful of well aged wine that smoothly coated the palate with unabashed silkiness, delivering rich and advanced raspberry and black cherry fruit flavors, animal fur and mushroom aromatics, and a streak of serious acidity to keep the wine as lively as it was exotic.  It generously expressed the licorice flavors the Clos Rougeard held closer to its vest.

The strategy worked and created a rewarding evening of drinking.  The structure of the ordering, inside this wine temple called Veritas, helped to keep my adrenalin in check.  Step 1: Known delicious white wine value.  Step 2: Classic wine laying in my own cellar to monitor drinkability.  Step 3: Ask the sommelier to follow your early moves with his own superior list knowledge.

What’s your game plan?

Some wine is described to be authentic. I have been meaning to build a working definition of authenticity for my own clarification and finally managed to squash a prolonged streak of procrastination after discovering ($25 ****) Sean Thackrey’s Pleiades XX on Atlanta’s Local Three Kitchen & Bar wine list. This adjective that has blossomed into standard wine enthusiast fodder, bandied throughout critical wine circles with head-spinning frequency, will no longer be taken casually here.  Research turned up these words and phrases to collectively define authenticity:

•         devotion to genuineness
•         truthfulness of origins
•         true to one’s own personality
•         conforming to original character and attributes
•         adherence to originality
•         lack of falsehood

This urgency around authentic clarity was driven by the reappearance of Pleiades in my glass, a wine and winemaker emanating high beams of authenticity, unlike anything I have ever tasted from California before, and a vintage version different from any other wine we came across in the vertical Pleiades tasting we conducted last year.

Conversely, Local Three Kitchen & Bar fanned antithetical flames of authenticity, housed in a building complex called Piazza at Paces somewhere off I-75 in a nondescript Atlanta, GA neighborhood.  The southern/suburban/Italian center is designed with grand Roman thematics in mind, and the restaurant is located off a lobby of what appears to be an office building named Forum.  You can park your charriot in a brand new multi level parking lot that is just behind the Forum.  When you finally navigate the commercial office space and open the door to the restaurant, you spatially transition one more time into yet another farm to table, contemporary barn decor, pig-art dominated meat theme park.  It’s a restaurant du jour, paying attention to local, meats, and comfort foods that you have been served at twenty other places.  All the boxes are checked, some surprisingly good (brussel sprouts), but most renditions not as compelling as earlier versions (i.e. pork buns compared to Momofuku’s).

While we could have been eating in Epcot Center’s Italy Pavilion housing a mediocre replica of a trendy themed American restaurant, Sean Thackrey and Pleiades XX came to authenticity’s rescue.  Dinner guests and wine became the focus of my experience.  The polarizing effect of a highly authentic wine showcasing the original attributes of its component parts, not dressed up to be anything it isn’t supposed to be, producing a drinking experience uniquely it’s own, and presenting a personality not shared with any other wine helped push away Local Three’s themed overtones.

The Marin county based iconic, idiosyncratic, and eccentric Sean Thackrey produces Pleiades without any adherence to style consistency year to year.  The blend is different each vintage, and possibly never totally represented on the label. According to this vintage’s label, Pleiades XX includes sangiovese, pinot noir, mourvedre, viognier, and syrah among others.  The appearance of the wine is on the lighter side, showing off the color characteristics associated with its sangiovese and pinot noir components.  You might be able to even see the hint of brown edge that lives at the edge of the glass of Pleiades XX at the right.

There’s a sweetness, almost candy apple quality to the aroma.  Earthy and leather notes are neatly tucked into the sweet nose.  Simply from the aromatics, it reminded me of Arianna Occhipinti’s southern Italian Frapatto since both wines offer floral sweetness, multi dimensional flavor profiles, great acidity, a lightness on their feet, and sweet/herbal/earthy changing aromatics.  Sage and thyme (maybe the mourvedre?) show up after the wine sits around in the glass for ten minutes.  The mouthfeel is like a graceful, medium rich pinot noir and it finishes with Burgundian like acidity.  Its a wine that juxtaposes styles and varieties to the drinker’s advantage.  It does all that for around $25 a bottle.  It could be one of the most interesting values in all of California.

In addition to my working definition of authentic wines, there is also Sean Thackrey’s Pleiades as a benchmark of authenticity.  And then there is Local Three Kitchen & Bar to prove authenticity is not required to be mostly presentable, sometimes yummy, occasionally attention-getting, and ordinarily unexciting.