Albiker is back

I sang the praises of Bodegas Luberri's Rioja Joven 'Albiker' 2004 in August 2005. When the 2005 vintage landed a couple of months ago, it was a little discombobulated, so we haven't had the wine since then. But we retasted the 2005 today, and it's back in form (wines, like people, often need some time to grow up). This is a positively slurpable red, all fruit and no oak, plenty of acidity, and just plain delicious. It's hard to imagine food that it wouldn't accompany gracefully, and it plays particularly well with spicy dishes (including tonight's spaghetti all'aglio e olio, which I laced with extra pepper flakes).

In August 2005, I asked, "So where the hell does the name 'Albiker' come from?" Our distributor for the wine, Sean Diggins, set me straight. The winemaker' s two sons are named Alberto and Iker, and he came up with Albiker as a name that gives each of them their due. For most Americans, the name probably suggests a guy named Al who rides a Harley. For me, however, the name will continue to call to mind an Arabic member of Hell's Angels ("Al" being the Arabic definite article: "The"). Yes, a little learning is a dangerous thing. But a little Albiker is a wonderful thing, and a lot of it is even better.

Filippo and Ronfranco

My father, Ron, turned 70 this year. He enjoys wine but doesn't share my predeliction for unearthing every conceivable detail about it. He also doesn't exhibit my intense tropism towards travel (although he's enjoyed himself when we've put him on the plane and taken him with us to Spain, Italy, and Portugal). So imagine my surprise when he asked to join my Piemonte harvest trip last month.

A year and a half ago, my father met Filippo Gallino, the producer of our best-selling barbera, when the Gallino family hosted a legendary dinner at their cascina (farmhouse and winery) in the Roero. Filippo subsequently came to California and had lunch at my parents' house in Sonoma. Filippo speaks no English and my father no Italian, but they managed to develop a non-verbal friendship through gestures and the occasional translated letter and e-mail message. As we made plans for the harvest trip, Filippo's family offered to put my father up in the family cascina.

So it was that my father spent 10 days living with the Gallino clan. He harvested arneis, brachetto, and barbera grapes with them, ate lunch in the vineyard, and enjoyed the dinners that Filippo's wife, Maria, cooked. He partook of the holy Roero trinity of wines that appear at almost every meal: Roero Arneis, Barbera d'Alba, and either Nebbiolo d'Alba or Roero (the area's best nebbiolo-based wine, and thus its namesake).

The lack of a common language made for occasional confusion when I wasn't there, but once again, gestures, guesswork, and goodwill overcame most of the misunderstandings. Some of them were humorous, as when he was introduced to Filippo's daughter's husband ("marito" in Italian), Giovanni, and thought for the first few days that his name was Marito. But my father asked questions, wrote down words, and gradually developed a small but functional vocabulary. He was quick to point out that the two most important possessions on the trip were his harvesting shears and his Italian-English phrase book.

"Ron" is not a recognizable name to Italians, and it became evident that "Franco", the Italianized version of my father's middle name "Frank", was easier for them to get their minds around. By the middle of the trip, we had settled on "Ronfranco" as a workable and stylish compromise.

It takes some daring for a 70-year old man to run off to Italy, change his name, and harvest grapes for the first time with a bunch of people whose language he doesn't speak. Come next year, my father will start to be able to drink the wines made from those grapes, as they make their way to the United States and into our store. For now, he - and we - can content ourselves with Filippo Gallino's Barbera d'Alba 2004 ($12.99). It remains my hands-down, budget-barbera favorite. I think Ronfranco would agree.

(Postscript: We recently got back in stock Filippo Gallino's Roero Superiore 2001. It's 100% nebbiolo and a steal at $18.00. )

Greek wine: Beyond Retsina

Today Ryan and I were tasting Greek wines and cheeses in preparation for the PMW / Pasta Shop class on August 24. Anyone who's read Homer or Plato knows that Greece has a millenia-long tradition of winegrowing and enthusiastic wine consumption. Yet its vinous history over the past several centuries has been sad indeed, thanks to domination by the Turks, various other political and economic woes, and the scurge of Retsina. The picture has been changing in recent decades, and we're now seeing excellent Greek wines from quality-minded producers. These are the three wines that we tasted today.

2003 Mercouri Foloï ($17)
Citrus, some night flowers (jasmine?), some spiciness, and a whisp of smoke. High acid and refreshing; very bright finish. It makes a mouth-watering aperitif, but I'd really love to try it with octopus. It went especially well with a wonderful Fetiri (Feta) cheese with wild Greek oregano and fresh mint.

2004 Gerovassiliou Malagousia ($22)
This wine is barrel-fermented and barrel-aged. It's richer, more exotic, with a hint of tropical fruits and that perfumed quality of a judiciously oak-aged wine. There's a smoky, crisp quality in the finish that keeps the wine from feeling heavy or over-ripe. We'll pair it with Manouri, a sheeps' milk cheese.

2002 Gerovassiliou Syrah ($27)
Superb syrah. It's a little less unique than the other two Greek wines here, but no less interesting or satisfying. (I remain convinced that syrah is the international wine grape par excellence; it seems to be capable of making characterful wines just about anywhere.) Reminiscent of Northern Rhône syrah: smoky, earthy, minerally, olive-y. This is a really classy wine. It didn't pair particularly well with any of the Greek cheeses that we tasted, but we're planning to whip up some lamb meatball kebabs for the class. I've had the wine with roast lamb before, and it was a brilliant combination.

Força Portugal!

Last month I spent two weeks in central and southern Portugal with my family. There we encountered, along with the full-bodied, rustic reds and sprightly vinhos verdes that seem to define Portuguese table wines in the United States, a remarkable range of well-made, well-balanced, and delicious wines from a bewildering array of indigenous Portuguese grape varieties. (One of the sobering joys of working in the wine industry is that one always has so much to learn!) We also found lots of older vintages for cheap, in both restaurants and stores. Not all of the wines were good, but many were excellent, a few were superb, and all were great value. And of course, as is true throughout most of Europe, the combination of local wine and local food was almost always immensely satisfying.

I was particularly impressed with some of the white wines that are less known than vinho verde in the U.S. So imagine my delight when I returned to PMW to find a newly arrived $9.99 Portuguese white: Quinta do Alqueve Ribatejo 2005. The region is Ribatejo (northeast of Lisbon). The grape variety is fernão pires (the most widely planted variety in Portugal; no, I don't know that, either!). The taste is fruity and gingery in the mid-palate, with a snappy, racy finish. I love this wine, and everyone I've served it to has remarked on how much they've enjoyed it.

So stretch out and try a table wine from Portugal. They may not have beat France - in wine or in the World Cup - but I'm now convinced that they're worth paying attention to.

Guy Gone Wild

My favorite solo bachelor's dinner: Pasta all'aglio e olio, a bottle of Tuscan red wine, and a green salad to finish. Put water on to boil. Mince some garlic, chop some Italian parsley, and wash the greens for the salad. When the water is near a boil, sauté the garlic in olive oil. Put salt and the pasta in the boiling water. I use Rustichella d'Abruzzo Chitarra pasta because the shape is cool - long, spaghetti-like noodles that are square in cross-section - and because I play the chitarra. So, in the old days, did they make use of old guitar strings to cut the pasta? And did they wash them first? And what happens if you use mandolina strings instead?

Sorry - back to our sizzling garlic.... Add some of the parsley, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper to the garlic and olive oil. When the pasta is al dente, drain it and toss it into the sauce. Add a little more parsley and salt and pepper to taste. My usual simple salad is some red leaf lettuce, a healthy quantity of arugula, and a few Italian parsley leaves for good measure. My standard salad dressing is olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper... and basta così.

The wine tonight is Sassotondo Rosso 2004 ($15) from the southern corner of Tuscany. It's mostly ciliegiolo with a little alicante and sangiovese. But who cares? - the important thing is that it tastes really good and really Italian and goes great with pasta. The producer (Carla Benini Ventimiglia) farms organically. Even better, she'll be here, along with four or five other producers from different regions of Italy, at our Italian Invasion party on June 11th.

Ribeiro in a bowl

During my first trip to Europe, Cheryl and I spent the better part of a week in Galicia - the region in northwestern Spain that sits above Portugal (and whose traditional language is a dialect of Portuguese, complete with all those full-bodied diphthongs and nasalized vowels). We ended up hanging out in the little town of Porto de Bares, eating pimientos de padrón (small, fried green peppers liberally dosed with olive oil and salt), pulpo gallego (octopus with paprika and potatoes), and the world's tastiest shrimp. We washed it all down with dollar-a-bottle, unfiltered Ribeiro.

Ribeiro is the everyday white wine of Galicia. It's much less well-known in the U.S. than Albariño, the high-class white from Galicia, but it's quite popular in Spain. The classic style for both types of wine is minerally, lighter-bodied, and very dry - sometimes with a slight spritz. Both are excellent aperitif wines and are superb with all kinds of seafood (especially shellfish). Ribeiro tends to be a little more rustic and hearty, while Albariño usually is more refined and elegant. It's good to have both options....

Last week I had the opportunity to spend a few days in Madrid, and friends there took me to a wonderfully authentic tapas bar whose specialty is Galician food and wine (El Chacón, Saavedra Fajardo 16, near the Puente Segovia). We elbowed our way through the crowd until we reached the bar and ordered pimientos de padrón, pulpo gallego, and Ribeiro. The unfiltered wine came in a white earthenware pitcher, with matching cups the shape of a deep saucer or flat bowl. We sucked on pimientos, munched chunks of octopus, sipped the cloudy, cool Ribeiro from the saucer-like cups, and of course threw our paper napkins on the floor as they became too greasy to absorb anything more.

As luck would have it, we recently began carrying a stunningly good Ribeiro: Vitivinicola del Ribeiro Viña Costeira 2004 ($16). This one is a little more refined than the dollar-a-bottle wine from Porto de Bares or the "jug wine" (literally!) from El Chacón. But it brings the same immediate pleasure as its more plebian cousins: you want to invite friends over, you want to eat seafood, you want to throw your napkins on the floor. And if warm weather ever returns to the Bay Area, this wine is poised to become the next irresistable PMW thirst-quencher.

...and New Year's Eve dinner

Wine is food. Champagne is wine. So Champagne is food. We confirmed all of these verities during another Feast of Many Courses on New Year's Eve.

Actually, we started with Cava as a warm-up act to the Champagne: Colet A Priori Brut Cava ($16). I like this wine a lot. Many inexpensive Cavas do their bubbly job without a lot of personality. This guy's got personality, thanks in part to discrete dashes of riesling, gewürztraminer, and muscat. It's fun to smell, fun to drink, and extremely reasonably priced.

At some point during the raw oysters, gravlax, and superb smoked trout from Hapuku Fish Shop, we opened Larmandier-Bernier Champagne Rosé de Saignée ($60). All of us at Paul Marcus Wines are in love with Larmandier-Bernier's Champagnes, but we only recently got the rosé in, and I hadn't tasted it before. It's the darkest rosé I've ever seen. It's not the best oyster wine, but oh, what a wine! I hadn't noticed before that it's Extra-Brut - that is, wickedly dry. I'm still puzzling over what to pair this wine with. Maybe paella?! (Pinot noir rosé - the still variety - has been a great paella match in the past.)

Andru and Cheryl's excellent vegetable pasta primo brought on some dry white wine that I no longer remember. Then we served romesco de peix (monkfish with Catalan romesco sauce) from the great Moro cookbook and Andru's memorable vegetable and caper contorno. I'd made the romesco de peix because: (1) monkfish is the poor man's lobster (more money left for Champagne!), (2) I love romesco sauce, and (3) I had a hunch that the dish would work well with Vilmart & Cie Champagne 'Grand Cellier' ($59). I was right (this time). The base wines for Vilmart's Champagnes are all aged in barrique, which gives the wine remarkable body and personality. Smelling them always reminds me of white Burgundy, and they have a textural quality that's pretty much unique among Champagnes.

The next time you're thinking about food and wine pairings, consider Champagne and other sparkling wines - on New Year's Eve or any other eve.

Christmas dinner...

Brother-in-law Joephas organized a Feast of Many Courses, including Cheryl's homemade tajarin (Piemontese tagliatelle) and a Piemontese sugo di fegatini (chicken liver sauce) from the wonderful cookbook La cucina delle Langhe del Barolo: I menù della memoria. It seemed a worthy occasion to drink some Piemontese wine, so I chose four bottles from our four friends in the Roero.

Marco Porello Roero Arneis 'Camestri' 2004 ($11.99): I've mentioned this one before, and once again it was a big hit with everyone. Cascina Val del Prete Roero Arneis 'Luèt' 2004: A wine that I drank a lot of during harvest 2005 and still among my very favorite Arneis. Very fine with grilled shrimp. Cascina Ca' Rossa Barbera 2003 ($15): Absolutely perfect with the tarajin al sugo di fegatini. Filippo Gallino Roero Superiore 2001: A wonderful nebbiolo that, as Filippo points out, "isn't afraid of any Barolo." Great with Enzo's stupendous filet mignon.

For a change of pace, we also opened a red Burgundy: J. F. Mugnier's Chambolle-Musigny 2002 ($57). Ohmygod. This is textbook Chambolle - supple, complete, and above all beautiful.

Then to finish, Sergio Degiorgis Moscato d'Asti 'Sorì del Re' 2004 ($16). I have yet to meet a human being who doesn't love Moscato. It's the dessert wine that I serve 95% of the time. Customers rave about it. Everyone should have a bottle in the refrigerator at all times.