The Big Drunk, Iberian Style

When it comes to wine tasting, we here at Hunter Angler Gardener Cook don’t mess around. No little sips here, no dainty sniff-n-swirls. And definitely no spit buckets. Nope. Holly and I and three of our friends gathered last weekend to try out some regional wines I’d acquired for a story I wrote about Spanish and Portuguese wine varietals here in California.

I reckoned six bottles would do us, three whites and three reds. (Like I said, we don’t mess around here.) We’d need food, too, so I brought out two kinds of home-cured olives, some of my charcuterie, a few homemade pickles, a bit of Maytag and Point Reyes blue cheese, some Fiscalini San Joaquin Gold, and oh yeah, table water crackers. Gotta have crackers with wine.

With that, we started on the whites. First up was a Torrontes made by the Fenestra Winery in Livermore. Livermore? Yah, well, the owner, a PhD named Lanny Replogle, makes Iberian-style wines with grapes grown just down the road in Galt, which is in the Lodi Appellation. We all loved this wine, which totally tossed us for a loop: We’d expected something crisp, but what we got was lush, tropical and tres phat (a technical term). It was almost as if a Roussane snuck into the bottle. Best combo: the Fiscalini cheese, which is semi-hard and a little like a Manchego.

I revealed my nefarious plan after the Torrontes was done: This night would in part be an Ode to Ron Silva, owner of Silvaspoons Vineyards and the man responsible for growing four of the night’s six wines. Silva is believed to be the first person in California to grow the Verdelho grape, and now all kinds of winemakers buy his fruit and make fantastic wines with it.

It is also the only grape Silva himself makes into wine, under the Alta Mesa label. So I decided we should try two of Silva’s Verdelhos from the same year, to see how two winemakers treated the same grapes. To go with them, I sauteed a big bowl of Gulf shrimp Spanish style.

Sorry Lanny. The Fenestra Verdelho was OK, definitely a good wine. But it was nothing compared to Silva’s own treatment of his grapes. Perfectly balanced, fruity yet still a little crispy, soft on the palate and rich from the ripeness of the grapes. Hands down, our favorite white.

On to the reds. The trio I chose turned out to be a bunch of bruisers, thick with flavor and all with either the tannins or the fruitiness to send us into the evening roaring. What better to go with them than some wild game?

We started with Fenestra’s Touriga Nacional, also made by Silva. Long-time readers know I like this grape, and we loved this wine so much I am buying some of Silva’s grapes to crush this year. What’s so special about it? Again, balance. This time Lanny nailed it perfectly. Good stiff tannins without being overly felty, a little fruit but nothing the likes of a Lodi Zin, lots of structure, and it…well, it tasted like wine ought to, like you’d imagine wine tasting 100 years ago.

We drank the Touriga with the last of the charcuterie: Lonzino, some sweet coppa and a dry, dry peperone made from antelope. Antelope, you say? Why yes, and I happened to have some antelope kidneys simmered in a Spanish sherry sauce to serve with the next wine, the Twisted Oak Torcido, which is a spectacular Garnacha (Grenache to you Francophiles).

Now Garnacha is not typically a big wine. It’s typically very fruity, but light in color with soft tannins. This is probably why the Twisted Winemakers up in Calaveras County decided to add 17 percent Petite Sirah to the mix. An absolutely perfect choice. This still isn’t a tannic wine like the Touriga, but it was rich, almost jammy and definitely a hedonistic fruit bomb. We likey.

As much as I enjoyed all these other wines, I must say we definitely left the best for last. Richard Ripken is one of the more fascinating vineyardists and winemakers I have yet met: He is always thinking, whirring, really, about ways to make wine better and grow the perfect grape for his little spot on the planet, which happens to be Lodi and the Delta. And just as Silva brought Verdelho to California, Ripken brought Viognier, or rather did all the field testing in this grapes, which is now the premier white in the Lodi region. But Viognier is a Rhone grape, and this night was for the Iberian Peninsula.

Richard Ripken is the creator of El Matador, the biggest, baddest wine of our evening. Ripken makes several varieties of this wine, but the one we tried was his Graciano, which is to Spain what Cabernet Sauvignon is to France. Inky, thick, tannic — yet sweetish, or at least still fruity — it is a muscular wine that most definitely tastes modern; a huge contrast to the Fenestra Touriga.

To go with El Matador, we had a stew made from the barn pigeons and a dove that Evan had shot the previous weekend. I stewed them with red wine, stock, whole shallots and carrots until the pigeon was falling off the bone. It was a great dish, but the Graciano kind of overpowered it. Next time I’ll whip out some elk or venison to match with this wine, which if you can find, I highly recommend you buy.

In fact, I’d recommend every one of the wines we had that night, and no, it wasn’t because I was three sheets to the wind at the time: They are all well-made, interesting wines you will not see every day.

I will say this, however. I did wake up the next morning with that not-so-fresh feeling, wondering how it had all come to this. Then I looked at the bottles: All but two were above 14 percent alcohol. Urp. So the 6-or-so glasses each we all had was roughly the equivalent of drinking a 12-pack of Pabst. Mmm-hmm. Headache explained. Gotta keep remembering about that moderation thing…