Fork and Gobble It: Warm Reflections for a Cold Weekend

Fridays on the BottleBlog will feature a food-related article, wine pairing, or travelogue. Today, Wine Manager Mark Ricca shares some of his travel stories.

It will be very cold in the Northeast this weekend. I am preparing myself by flipping through photos of wine trips I have taken over the past three years and the food, wine, and experiences that they gave me. After ten years of being a wine professional, I can say that this is a great business to work in. I like to tell people, "You'll never be rich, but the perks are sooooo nice." Meeting people, traveling, trade tastings, you get to do some pretty interesting stuff and a lot of it is just part of the job. I have always traveled to visit different wine producing regions as part of my work since I have been doing this, but over the last three years I was lucky enough to visit three countries that I had always wanted to see, Chile and Argentina in South America and Spain.

In April of 2009 I traveled to Buenos Aires to begin a seven day tour of the wine producing regions around Mendoza, Argentina and Santiago, Chile. Argentina is a meat lover's paradise. Beef, goat and lamb are on proud display roasting on open fires in the windows of restaurants throughout the city. My tour group's first day in B.A. was designated a "relax" day, and I loved the lunch a renegade band of us took in one of the parillas, or grill restaurants, that dot the city blocks. Window shopping for grilled meat was more like it. Picture windows showing fire pits with goat carasses splayed on long skewers roasting slowly to perfection made for carnivore paradise.

We started lunch with one of the native sparkling wines which Mendoza is quite adept at producing these days. For my meal I opted for a grilled skirt steak garnished with chimichurri the local garlic/herb and chili condiment and a nice Malbec to wash it all down. Not a bad way to start a business trip.

That whole trip was as much about food as it was about wine. Lunch at Pascual Toso one afternoon was more like a bacchanal than just a business luncheon. Like so many of the estates we visited they had an outdoor kitchen complete with a wood fired oven for empanadas. Empanadas are very serious business in Argentina. Some of the examples I had in Mendoza were ethereal. Light pastry filled with beef and onion or shrimp and vegetables, were ridiculously easy to eat. I have yet to find a restaurant here in the tri-state area that comes close.

An open pit with a goat over it smoldered filling the air with a sensuous aroma while a grill a few feet away was busy cooking a variety of cuts of meat and blood sausages.


I fortunately am not shy about any of these foodstuffs and I dug right in.

Again, Malbec was the order of the day for wine, although each of the estates that we visited did their own sparkling wine served to us during the "cocktail hour." All of those proved delicious and I'm grateful we carry at least a couple in the store at any given time. The estate wines from Toso are excellent, as were the reservas. Once again the old adage proved true that when you eat locally you should drink locally as well for the very best pairing.

Where a landlocked and primarily agricultural country such as Argentina was all about meat, when we crossed the Andes into that thin strip of coastal country that is Chile, seafood stepped into prominence on the menus. I recall a ride up to a vista to overlook some of the vineyards that are part of the Vina Montes empire with the man himself, Aurelio Montes. At the top the breathtaking view was enhanced even further by ceviche and a Montes rose. A very gleeful group posed for a Kodak moment with their host.


I'm sure anyone who reads thinks "Wow, I'd really love to be able to do that." Don't be so quick. There was considerable work to be done on this trip also. When we got back down from that hilltop, we had to taste through a flight composed of all the current releases in the Montes portfolio. Man, that was ugly.

On a more recent trip to Spain, food and regionality were again juxtaposed as we traveled the entire country end to end in seven days. Silly as it may sound, this was actually hard work. It was all done in a van. One of my favorite meals on that trip was a seaside luncheon in Malaga. Family style platters of pristine seafood of every imaginable type were trotted out before us. We washed it back with a dry Moscatel from Jorge Ordonez. A gorgeous wine made with the regions prominent white grape but in this case fermented dry, it was fantastic with all that fish and shellfish. The real eye opener was the Langostines.

Even when the food was simple, it was exotic. More complicated and layered preparations such as Valencia's renowned Paella still retained a comfort food, unpretentious feel that belied the labor intensive technique they required. Snails never tasted so good.

Being composed of snails, which are abundant as is the rabbit that goes into that dish, a wine with a certain gamey quality to it was required. We drank Garnacha from El Nido which paired well with the meal and brought an exotic element all its own.

Now as I write this, I have just finished shoveling another six inches of snow off my driveway and sidewalks and I look forward to another wine and food laden jaunt as I head off to Tuscany in May for my honeymoon. I can already feel the warmth despite this winter cold and anticipate the the excitement in even the simple offerings of the locals.