Ramón Bilbao with Pad Thai
Ramón Bilbao
Winery Ramón Bilbao
www.bodegasramonbilbao.es/
D.O.C: Rioja
Grapes: 50% Tempranillo, 50% Garnacha.
Ageing: Malolactic fermentation in new French oak barrels, where its ageing will continue on its lees for 15 months.Price: 12,50€
Excerpt from the book “Pairings of spanish wines with exotic cuisines”.
Click to see the preparation of these dishes, in Asian recipes.
That “viñedos de altura” (high altitude vineyards) in the name has a logical explanation: this wine is made from the grapes harvested in the hawthorns at Villalba and Tudelilla, the ones placed at a highest altitude among all the vineyards this winemaker has got in La Rioja.
This determines a peculiar character, on the edge of red wines.
The most interesting thing might be the 50/50 blend of Tempranillo and Garnacha, a grape that is getting outstanding results as long as it is well grown, harvested and vinified.
The wine has a very fresh smell of recently harvested fruit, with hints of flowers like lilacs and the characteristic nuances from a complicated ageing on lees which produces those hints of cocoa, tobacco, vanilla… The dominant taste is always ripe fruit, with hints of raspberry and a very elegant and complex mineral sensation of graphite.
Pad Thai
This dish is as common in Thailand as paella is among us, even more as it is consumed both in coastal and inland regions, with a thousand variations more or less sophisticated.
The base is the pasta, a sort of rather fleshy noodles or spaghetti which are sautéed with different vegetables, meat, fish or seafood, often with tamarind pulp and a fish sauce of industrial origin, as popular in Thailand as tomato sauce is in Spain.
The recipe that we have included is more or less orthodox, although with products that can be found in our markets. If you travel to Indochina, remember to ask if it is spicy, because in that case it may leave your mouth burning and spoil the wine, therefore a different pairing would be required.
Pairing
It was very risky to pair a Rioja wine with such a complex-tasting dish as shrimps Pad Thai, with its compulsory tamarind pulp, ginger and oyster sauce, but the result could be awesome. If the experiment failed, well, it could be forgotten, but the wine withstood the aromatic burden of the dish as I had expected and brought seriousness to the combination, as you might expect from great Rioja wines.
If the ingredients are tried separately, the combination really seems suicide, but when all of them are combined that holistic effect that creates a new flavour independently from its components takes place, making us think that we were on the right track from the first bite.