Chef Paul Kahan
(Photo: Michael Stryder)

I’ve been a devotee of Chicago’s Blackbird restaurant for at least seven years. So I was thrilled when the restaurant’s gifted chef, Paul Kahan, was asked to showcase the wines of Peter Sisseck’s Dominio de Pingus at a private home dinner that I attended during the recent Jackson Hole Wine Auction weekend.

I love what they do at Blackbird and its sister restaurants, Avec and Publican. There’s a common element to the food in all three places: though it seems outwardly simple, there’s a real depth to the flavors and a surprising complexity beneath the surface. This is not flashy cuisine, yet it appeals on so many levels that Blackbird must surely offer one of America’s most consistently complete dining experiences.

In Jackson Hole, Chef Kahan and his team had to come up with a menu based on wines they’d barely tried! As the Wholesale Director for Pingus’ national importer, The Rare Wine Co, I was asked to give some guidance. I sent Chef Kahan a bottle of ‘06 Flor de Pingus to sample, and some very simple notes on what I thought worked as pairings with these wines (i.e., meat, meat, game, meat). I also arranged for a bottle of Peter Sisseck’s one white wine, Clos d’Agon Blanco, to be delivered, but unfortunately, it never got to Chef Kahan’s hands. Given the constraints, I didn’t envy Paul’s job in the least.

The menu that Paul and his very engaged brigade came up with blew everyone away. What’s more, it was fascinating to hear the low key chef break down each dish between courses–and to realize how much thought and craft went into building these seemingly uncomplicated plates.  You can download a .pdf of the “official” menu here, but each dish had several modifications as finally plated.  I didn’t keep any detailed notes, but the highlights included:

2007 Clos d’Agon Blanco - This wine, from Spain’s Costa Brava, is made of Viognier, Marsanne and Roussane. It’s similar to a Northern Rhône white, but seems a little fresher and less nutty than some of those wines. The Kahan team came up with an off-the-charts combination of grilled octopus confit with Dungeness crab. It was served with a little whipped brandade and a couple of last-minute substitutions. I wish I’d kept notes because the pairing was dazzling–with the earthy/smoky quality of the octopus playing off the more overt “fishiness” of the brandade and crab0–with everything finding a mirror in the wine.

2001 Flor de Pingus - This wine is really entering a great drinking phase, with a touch of secondary development but still plenty of youthful energy. A beautiful piece of aged Pekin duck breast was served with small slices of seared foie gras with baby turnips. For palates jaded by too much foie gras, this course would be a relevation.  The foie was used like that finishing pat of butter so common in French food. It added some mid-palate richness to the dish without overwhelming anything else. The hint of fruit lightened things up without overwhelming the dish, and really mirrored some of the fruit in the wine. Another fantastic pairing.

2004 Pingus - Still an infant, but many in the crowd remarked that it deserves its 100-point Wine Advocate rating … or it will when it matures. The pairing–with oysters–was, for me, a shocker. Coincidentally, before I learned of the menu, I actually joked with Paul at the morning intro meeting that “I wouldn’t serve Pingus with oysters, but it should work with just about anything else.” Paul replied, “We’re serving it with oysters.” It seems wildly counter-intuitive, but the dish absolutely hit the bull’s eye. The trick was to bring the oyster into the red wine realm. The oyster was smoked (or grilled?) which lessened its brininess, and then served on a glorious cube of wood-grilled pork belly surrounded by some “smoked” bonito broth. The descriptors aside, I still don’t know why this worked so well … but it was a dish that more than held its own with the powerful Pingus.

2000 Pingus - This was, for me, the wine of the night. From some of the lowest yields in Pingus’ history, it was always a black hole of a wine–full of promise buy very reticent. On this night, it finally showed a hint of what’s coming. There was a real core of fruit but the texture had mellowed and the aromatics were billowing from the glass. It’ll never match the sheer scale of the 2004, but it rivals it for completeness. Paul toned down his fireworks with this dish-a beautiful piece of lamb served with bitter chocolate, leeks, and a little blood sausage. It was a really satisfying course, and a subtle way to let the final wine show its stuff.

Pingus assistant winemaker Patricia Benitez was on hand to comment on the wines, and the beautiful Teton mountains were framed by the windows of host Baird Garret’s home. It’s hard to imagine a better setting for this dinner, or a better chef to pull it all together.

Having represented Pingus in America for more than a decade, I’ve long been aware of this iconic wine’s stature not only in Spain, but around the world.

But just how important Pingus, and its maker Peter Sisseck, have become was driven home to me in June when I looked at the list of 654 Spanish wines newly reviewed on erobertparker.com. There was Pingus again on top, owning for the fourth vintage in a row a perfect or nearly perfect score: 99, 99, 100, 96-100.

But the scores don’t really explain the extent of Pingus’ cult, which stretches around the globe and was born over a sixteen month period in 1996 and 1997.

The seed was planted in August 1996, when Robert Parker called Pingus’ first vintage (1995) “one of the greatest and most exciting young red wines I have ever tasted.” But the cult fully flowered in November, 1997, when a ship carrying the entire U.S. allocation of the 1995 broke up in high seas off the Azores. Much of the wine had been presold, forcing merchants into the market to make good on their sales. This drove prices up by several hundred percent.

Other new wines have had their moment of fame, but for Pingus, the allure only became stronger. It helped that Peter has never made more than 500 cases in a single vintage. But far more important, the wine’s quality continued to get better, reflecting Peter’s maturing ideas and skills as a winemaker. He has emerged as one of the intellectuals of winemaking in Europe, a student of Rudolf Steiner, and a firm believer in both organic and biodynamic viticulture.

For Peter, Pingus’ success has been a gift. He had the very good fortune to acquire some of the finest, oldest vineyards in Ribera del Duero when it was still possible to do so, and he used these vineyards to create one of the world’s iconic wines. The acclaim has made him a global celebrity as well as an idol for other winemakers in Spain.

In 2006, Peter decided to pay back the region that had been so good to him. Read more…

Alvaro in the L'Ermita vineyard (Priorat) just before harvest in 2003.

Last night, I drank a magical bottle of 2006 Descendientes de Jose Palacios “Moncerbal,” one of the single-cru Bierzo bottlings of Alvaro Palacios and Ricardo Perez. Much has been written about the high quality of this and the other Descendientes wines, but for me 2006 Moncerbal represents something else: the richness that is Spain’s birthright, but with an “Old World” sense  of restraint and terroir—characteristics that are not always present in the country’s elite wines.

Drinking that bottle reminded me of a conversation I had with Alvaro nearly a decade ago, at a time when he had not yet become a superstar. We were talking about Spanish wine generally, and I recall him saying something to this effect: “In Spain, we are blessed with old vines and plenty of sun. Power comes very easily to us. But, what is it that makes the great wines of France so revered? Their esteem comes from their equilibrium and their distinctive personalities. There is no other wine in the world that tastes like Coche-Dury Corton-Charlemagne, or Petrus, or La Tache. It’s the intensity of personality that makes those wines so great.”

But Alvaro also drew a distinction between conditions in Spain and those in France. Read more…