ALBARINO: SPAIN’S GREAT FOOD PAIRING SHAPE SHIFTER
For a couple years, I’ve been recommending Albariños to customers who want something “different” to pair with Asian takeout or seafood dinner. But the real challenge is finding ways to pair this wine with, as they called it in the 80s, nouvelle cuisine, or as we call it now in the Mac Renaissance, “fusion”— that multi-ethnic blend of flavors and inspirations originating anywhere from Laos to Red Bank, New Jersey, that has become the new standard in fine dining.
The place was Perilla, of Top Chef Season One winner Harold Dieterle fame. Satisfies the challenge on many levels, mainly: it’s new and it’s not Spanish or obviously Asian. Plus, hey, this cat has been slowly hemorrhaging curiosity since it opened, and this seemed like an excellent way to try it out as well.
The wines were Albariño de Fefiñanes 2007 from Rίas Baixas (on the restaurant’s list) and Terras Gauda 2007, from the O Rosal region of Rías Baixas. The former is a traditionally made, 100% Albariño with characteristic citrus and acidity, and a pleasant floral/herbal mesh of flavors in the finish. The latter is a blend of 70% Albariño, 20% Loureiro and 10% Caiño Blanco. A bit softer on the palate and lacking the herbal notes, while maintaining fresh acidity and some sweet floral structure in the finish.
The biggest challenge was not the pairings so much as the appearance of gluttony and ordering to ostensibly match the wines. But blowing that idea out of the water, this is a pairing challenge after all, we ordered three apps and three mains, with plates so clean at the end they possessed squeaking capabilities heard by wild dogs as far as Nova Scotia.
Appetizers were duck meatballs with a spicy ginger sauce, a natural match for both wines, heirloom tomato salad with a fresh herbal dressing that matched best with the Fefiñanes’ herbal notes and, just ‘cause we couldn’t resist, rabbit pappardelle in a light, but meaty tasting herbal broth, that was screaming like James Brown in a frigid swimming pool… for an Italian red. Sorry.
Mains were trigger fish (in the skate family) in a sweet and sour basil and eggplant sauce with quinoa and more heirloom tomatoes; duck again, this time with ginger, pistachios, mustard greens and golden currants (trust me, it works); and the crown jewel, Romesco oil poached cod with black olive gnocchi (the names of my first born), oyster mushrooms and summer zucchini sauce. And a side of fresh local creamed corn with wild chives (hey, when in Rome, right?).
The trigger fish matched beautifully with both wines, playing well off the citric notes. The duck was trickier, as the mustard greens were grassy, better with the Fefiñanes’ herbal-ness again. The cod matched both wines like your favorite pair of black pants (nearly cheating since this was distinctly Spanish in every layer of flavor). Neither wine liked the corn. The corn was so fresh and sweet that it made everything taste like toothpaste. Same was true of dessert, which itself was as uniformly surprising, multilayered and spectacular as the rest of the meal, but too sweet for the wines. I should also mention we were served gratuitous, as my mother says, sorbets as palate cleansers that were the only fault of the meal. Way too herbaceous and weird tasting, they seemed more like cleansers period, and forget about how they went with the wines.
No surprise here, the 100% Albariño from Perilla’s own list matched everything best, while the blend sometimes seemed too tame. Perilla itself is a revelation, all dishes with numerous ingredients that all come together without being ungepotchkeed (Yiddish for overly complicated). I’m using that as my Zagat’s quote.
Amanda Schuster was most recently the Spanish Wine Buyer at Morrell & Co., and was also a consultant at Astor Wines & Spirits, both in New York City
