TWIB Notes: This Week In Bottles

Four meals, four wines.

Beef, smoked mackerel, chicken and tuna. Rioja, Sancerre, torrontés and pinot gris. Spanish, veggie explosion, Mexican, Thai.

Squeezed into these four meals were 32 vegetables and 28 herbs, spices, wines and juices.

Or...flavor.

Monday

#310 - Walnut-Pomegranate Chicken & Rapini With '01 La Rioja Alta Viña Ardanza Reserva Especial

Three months ago in Rioja, during the best vacation of our lives, a restaurant was recommended to us by someone in the know on one of the nights we didn't have any food plans.

Los 4 Arcos in Briones, particularly for their lamb roasted over wine vines, a tradition quickly becoming a rarity in Rioja, as we were told.

I think everyone has those places they're told about where the possibility of eating THAT becomes almost mythical in their brains. It becomes a bit of an obsession, something that HAS to happen, especially after driving there, up a myriad of zig-zagged, impossibly narrow "streets" to the very peak of the hilltop town only to find out they were closed for their September vacation.

So that lamb, the thought of eating that lamb, morphed into THE lamb, the one that has transformed into the pinnacle of having lamb and we haven't even eaten it yet.

Stupid and silly brain stuff, that. But with tentative plans to go back to Rioja (and Hotel Viura, Arzak and Etxebarri), Los 4 Arcos will hopefully be able to accommodate us because that's lamb that we want to eat, both because of what it is and what it's become in our brains.

I say all this because this meal with this wine jettisoned itself into that superlative Spanish food and wine world we love so much, that place where the meal tastes like something Given. Something that makes you say, "Nah. THIS doesn't exist. It doesn't!" It tastes like an intimate history of a place that we seemingly know but weren't born there, only been to a couple of times and don't even really know the language. It's stuff that feels like a gift.

Just does.