My best Spanish wine moment was having a bottle of Tempranillo with a platter of chunky barra kebabs from Mini Mughal, a poky address that serves some really fine Punjabi food in the tony Jor Bagh neighbourhood of New Delhi. I hid the fact from my wino friends because they would have laughed me out of the city—the combination was as unfashionable as it could get.
After a visit to Rioja (pronounced rio-kha), Spain’s top wine region and home of the Tempranillo, I realised I was wrong. I was visiting a fancy winery and, to my surprise, I was served something as unpretentious as a chorizo (spicy Spanish sausage) stew with a crianza, a young wine that had spent at least a year in oak barrels. It was a feast I shared with rambunctious Spanish men who drank and sang as if it were the last day of their lives.
That’s when I learnt (apart from unmentionable Spanish words for parts of a woman’s anatomy) the basic lesson of wine and food pairing— it is OK to drop names of big chefs and fancy dishes, but to double the pleasure of wine drinking, you’ve got to pair regular food with regular wine. We can’t have a professionally managed wine dinner at home every day, can we?
From barra kebabs and chorizo stew to a fine wine dinner at the gargantuan Lodhi restaurant at the Aman New Delhi seems like a cultural space flight, but I discovered the uncharted territories of Spanish wine after a gastronomic tour de force accompanied by three kinds of sherry and four wines. The high point of the evening was to be the Unico, Spain’s iconic brand Vega Sicilia’s top-drawer offering (the vintage was 1996) that sells for anything between £150 to £250 in the London market. Everyone’s favourite, though, was an unknown wine from a region people scarcely knew about.
It was the 1999 San Ramon from Bodegas Maurodos, a winery set up by a former Vega Sicilia winemaker whose products have been getting 90+ ratings from leading wine publications, including Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate. We were stunned by its luscious fruitiness and silky tannins—it’s the kind of wine that pirouettes on your tongue and stays in your memory long after the dinner is forgotten. It’s like a dark-haired Spanish beauty trapped, like Aladdin’s genie, in a wine bottle.
We were served the wine with neatly grilled tuna that arrived on a bed of white beans, chorizo and tomato ragout (rah-goo, or sauce). Opinion on the tuna was divided, but some of us were already imagining having the wine with wholesome, chewy, Punjabi seekh kebabs. That was interesting, for the grapes at the core of the San Ramon are the Tinta de Toro, which are clones of Tempranillo developed in Toro.
The lesser-known wine region takes its name from the historic town of Toro sitting in the westernmost part of Castilla y León, almost within shouting distance from that part of Portugal where port is made. Today, Toro is known primarily for its blockbuster wines, but it was once the site of Spain’s first university before it was moved to Salamanca.
With Spain getting unravelled because of the efforts of Aman, which has an ambitious wine programme, and its Bordeaux-based supplier, Christopher Cannan, I am sure we’ll discover another world of tastes and perceptions. That’s the beauty of being a nation of wine novices. There’s a new discovery to be made each time we uncork a bottle of wine.
Sourish Bhattacharyya is Executive Editor, Mail Today
