Joe Canal's Travels to Spain - Part 6 (Finale)

Fridays on the BottleBlog will feature a food-related article, wine pairing, or travelogue. Today, conclude our travels with Wine Manager Mark Ricca and the team to Spain!

We pulled up in front of Bodegas Muga where we were greeted by Jesus Viguera, export manager for the estate. A very casual and affable man, he brought us inside to cool off from the midday heat. This was our sixth day in Spain and temperatures had been climbing steadily all week into the mid and upper 80s. Jesus gave us a quick tour of the winery including something you don't see very often these days, a cooperage. Muga has three full time coopers employed making all the oak barrels for the winery.

After the tour we headed to our hotel and I should mention we were treated to first class accommodations all the way. The hotel was close to where we would be eating that night, north of Rioja in the seaside resort of San Sebastian on Spain's north coast. We would actually have the luxury of some down time in the city, which was a real treat as it is a beautiful place and the weather could not have been better. The streets were full of people as I walked to a pier to look out at the ocean. I didn't have much time, just enough to grab a glass of wine in an outdoor cafe and reflect for a bit. I took a vacant seat at a table and after a quick inquiry as to what was available, ordered a glass of Txakoli, a lightly sparkling white wine that is made for moments like this. I wondered if my accent gave away the fact that I was a tourist. Nah, I thought, it's the camera. DOH!!!!

I finished my wine, checked my watched and saw I had just enough time to get back to my room, get cleaned up and dressed and head off to dinner. Tonight was the most anticipated meal of the trip. We were going to a Guide Michelin 3 star restaurant overlooking the Bay of Biscay in San Sebastian, called Akelare. For 35 years Chef/Owner Pedro Subijana has been interpreting Basque cuisine with surgical execution of presentation, supreme culinary skill, and a wicked sense of humor. We would drink the wines of Bodegas Muga with this meal, a perfect setting to appreciate them. This restaurant is in a storybook setting perched in the cliffs over the sea. The atmosphere in the dining room held the same serenity as the outside. The wait staff was friendly, helpful, extremely knowledgeable, all without being intrusive or hovering. Then there was the food itself.


This is not a box of sweets at the end of the meal, but an amuse bouche at the beginning. What you're looking at is a selection of savory bites disguised as candies. For example, the item in the bottom right of the picture is a “Mackerel Hamburger”.
It gets better.

Wild Mushrooms with “Egg Pasta”. Sauteed wild mushrooms with strands of separated egg white and yolk “pasta”. This is food that plays on your senses and then overloads them. The tasting menu moved like a roller coaster through eight courses. Each one was inventive, charming, and above all, delicious. And the wine??

We started with a Rioja Blanca which worked really well with the amuse bouche. Then a parade of great reds right on up through the Muga portfolio. Muga Riserva 2005, a special riserva called Prado Enea, a Gran Riserva 2002, a proprietary blend only made in the best vintages called Torre Muga (2005), and a single vineyard Rioja call Aro (2004).

Torre Muga 2005:
Color: Dark ruby
Nose: Black fruits, mulberry, blackberry, cedar, tobacco, scorched earth
Palate: Blackberry, mulberry, coffee, mineral, tobacco, persistent medium grained tannins, medium + acidity. This wine needs time!!!

We finished up dinner with coffee, boarded the van once more and headed back to the hotel. Jesus insisted on a nightcap in the hotel bar which we didn't decline. Tomorrow would be another long day and our last of the trip.

We now turned southbound, (we had to, there was no more Spain to the north) to the Navarra region which borders Rioja and Bodegas Nekeas. The husband and wife team of Jose' Manuel Urricelqui and Concha Vecino make wonderful, fresh wines from traditional and non-traditional varieties. They greeted us upon our arrival and we headed right out to their vineyards. Jose' handles the vineyards while Concha makes the wines. Their mindset is minimal intervention and they believe the wine really is made in the vineyard. The vineyards themselves sit in gently rolling hills in Navarra, at the base of the Pyrenees with the Atlantic Ocean to the north. The mountains help hold in the warming influence of ocean which makes it ideal for the vines. We returned to the winery which is fairly new and Concha made no attempt to hide her pride in the facility or her love of her work. Her passion fuels her innovation. This was well illustrated when she told us how she now sanitizes the huge stainless fermentation tanks in the winery. She was looking for a way to clean these massive tanks without using chemicals. She was determined not to risk her or anyone elses' health by exposure to them, but she also had to keep her costs in line. She learned that the organisms left behind after fermentation can be killed by filling the tanks with ozone gas, which is easily and inexpensively produced by a machine the size of a large vacuum cleaner. I think I was as amazed as she was proud of this discovery.

We moved into a classroom like room to taste through her wines. The wines themselves are labeled Vega Sindoa in reference to the valley where the vineyards are located. Here are my notes on the Vega Sindoa Chardonnay.

Vega Sindoa Chardonnay Navarra 2009:
Color: Yellow with green highlights, clean and bright.
Nose: Apples, lemon, and smoke.
Palate: Melon, apple, citrus zest, and mineral.

We stepped out of the classroom onto a patio into a warm sunny Sunday afternoon. Platters of grilled sausages and glasses of Vega Sindoa rose' were passed, and what was this? The ice cubes in the rose were made from the rose itself. Brilliant.

We would have a full lunch (How much do these guys think I can eat anyway?) in a little while, but Concha had an idea in the meantime. Typically on Sunday everyone goes to the tavern for beers, wine, and tapas. Would we like to join them there today? I held out my arm as an offer for her to twist. We drove into town and entered what could have been a small town tavern anywhere in the world on a peaceful spring Sunday afternoon. Beers, tapas, small town life, it was the perfect day, but now it was time to get back to their house at the winery to eat.

Lunch was very relaxed, filled with great food like roast pigeon, and great wines. Being taken into someone’s home and sharing a meal is one thing, but to have it happen with total strangers in a foreign country is something really unique especially when the sincerity is so evident. We finished lunch and thanked Concha and Jose' profusely for their generousity. We had one last stop to make and it was a big one, Bodegas Borsao to the south in Campo de Borja. Back into the van we went for the hour plus ride to Borsao.

This was easily the hottest day of the trip with temperatures getting into the high 80s. We arrived at Borsao late in the afternoon and were greeted by Jose Miguel Sanmartin, and Jose Luis Chueca. Wanting to make the most of the daylight we headed right out to tour some vineyard sites. Borsao is a cooperative winery that began 42 years ago in the city of Borja. In it's current state it is actually a composite resulting from the merger of three co-ops, being Borja, Tabuenca, and Pozuelo producing 15,900,000 liters annually. The leading varietal is Garnacha, followed by Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, and Tempranillo. Vineyard tours are unfortunately all pretty much similar, so yeah, we went out into a field and looked at grapevines. What was different here is that in the vineyard we visited was a shelter that had existed before SUVs or even cars for that matter were common in the area. That meant that laborers needed a place to eat and sleep in the vineyard when the workload demanded.

We returned to the winery in the van to taste through a flight of the Borsao wines. These wines have represented some of the best red wine values in the marketplace for the past seven years. They are not incredibly complex wines, neither are they thin or weedy. Garnacha in this style is full bodied, fruity with a decided spicy, peppery note. They are great food and cheese wines that are a no brainer for everyday drinking. Price to quality ratios in co-op produced wines can be very good because of the reduced cost of production.

Tasting notes on Borsao Crianza Seleccion 2007 Campo de Borja:
Color: Dark ruby, clean
Nose: Sweet red fruit, flowers, cedar, baking spice
Palate: Bright, lush, red fruit (plums, berries), medium, fine grained tannins, medium acidity

We left the winery after the tasting to check into our last hotel of the trip and clean up for our final dinner in Spain. We would eat in the town of Zaragoza at a small restaurant called bal d'onsera which had the distinction of one star in the Guide Michelin. Typically the restaurant would be closed on Sunday evening, but the Chef/Owner Corella Josechu and his wife Carmen Arregui came in that night just to serve us. No menus; the food just started coming out. This was on the showy, innovative side of presentation but with more reserve than we'd seen earlier that week. For example, an amuse of salmon roe with black truffle and a truffle cappuccino:


The presentations here were compact, well focused, dishes that balanced intensity and then subtlety of flavors. The wines on the other hand were all about intensity. We did a four wine flight for this dinner, all Garnacha based wines, all Hulks. The little brother of the bunch was the Borsao Tres Picos, followed by the trio from the flagship line from Borsao, Alto Moncayo. Alto Moncayo Veraton, Alto Moncayo Moncayo, and Alto Moncayo Aquillon were for the most part, way over the top for this menu, but this was not an orchestrated pairing. This really was about the wine.

My notes on Alto Moncayo Aquillon 2007 Campo de Borja:
Color: Black in the glass
Nose: Saturated aromas of blackberries, cedar, mineral (think crushed stones), intensity is over the top.
Palate: Blackberries and mulberries in a syrupy concentration with a creamy mouthfeel, baking spice, cedar, mint, mineral, soft tannins, medium acidity.

Not sure how these wines will hold up for the long term, but my feeling is that they are super luxury cuvees meant to garner high critical praise and then be consumed.

We concluded with coffee and the last remnants of the open bottles. We thanked our hosts, especially the couple serving us, and walked the short distance back to the hotel.

This was an intense tour. The people we met, the properties and facilities we saw, opened our eyes and our minds to Spain as a very game player on the world wine stage. We were grateful to all of our very generous hosts who not only shared things like wine and food with us, but their time and themselves. Without this passion, there could not be the integrity and quality we taste in the wine.