Ezzaguire Txakoli. At MWS it sells for $9.99 / 8.99, but at the restaurant in Gaetario it was considerably less. Then we spent three delightful
hours with Roque Ezzaguire, the owner/vigneron of Domaine Ezzaguire.This past June, after 5 days of winetasting at Bourdeaux's Vinexpo we headed south to Bibao for a day of relaxation at the new Guggenheim Museum. My usual museum limit is about 1 hour after which I get bone-weary. Not so at the Guggenheim. The stunning architecture, and the fascinating sculpture exhibits, in steel by Richard Sera and wrought iron by Basque sculptor Chilado, held me enthralled for hours. Bibao, by the way, is a lovely city - friendly, clean, inexpensive, and offering great food.
On the way to Bilbao, on the dockside in the fishing village of Gaetario, we had
a fabulous fresh seafood lunch, washed down of course with our delicious Basque seafood wine Ezzaguire Txakoli. At MWS it sells for $9.99 / 8.99, but at the restaurant in Gaetario it was considerably less. Then we spent three delightful
hours with Roque Ezzaguire, the owner/vigneron of Domaine Ezzaguire.
Roque speaks not a word of English - our Spanish is minimal, our Basque non-existent - he is a delightfully ebullient man who rarely stops talking. Amazingly, we communicated! He showed us around his moutainside vineyard and his home/winery clinging to the mountain above the town of Zarautz, tasted his wine and had a great time.
After Bibao, we travelled along and through the Pyrennes from Atlantic to the Meditteranean - stunning scenery and scary driving amidst suicidal Sunday drivers. We survived that part of the trip but suffered an embarassing, minor mishap while trying to turn around on a narrow mountainside road within a mile of our destination. We were disabled with one front (driving) wheel hanging over a ditch. By a stroke of luck, a local family on their way to Sunday dinner came upon us and took over our rescue. They tried to pull us out with a rope which broke. One of the men took off and returned with a wire rope and had us back on our way, refusing to accept anything for their trouble. Some "unfriendly" Frenchmen, huh! In actual fact they were probably Catalan.
And so we made it to the Terrasse de Soleil, a lovely hideaway offering scrumptuous food in a scenically stunning location in the mountains in the Roussillon region, not far from the Spanish border and the Mediterranean Ocean. Of course we tasted and enjoyed big, Grenache-based, wines quite a few of which adorn our shelves.
We returned to the Atlantic Pyrenees, via the Corbieres region around Carcassone, to the Basque village of St-Jean-Pied-a-Port - pretty but very commercial - offering wonderful food and big, bold Basque wines made entirely of the Tannat grape. Our last night was spent at a mecca for gourmands, in Magesc, a sleepy town in the flat plain between Bordeuax and the Pyrenees, sporting no less than a Michelin two-star, and a Michelin two-fork restaurant, the former in a sumptuous hotel and the latter in a rural pine forest.
Almost at the end of the trip I realized that we had experienced two very old
cultures - Basque on the Atlantic and Catalan on the Mediterranean. Both cultures straddle the Pyrenees and survive
actively in Spain and France reflecting not only in politics and language but in food and wine. Basque wines focus
on Tannat; Catalan on Grenache. Another revelation was that the name Uruguay is Basque and that the Basques took
their Tannat to Uruguay when they fled to the New World more than a century ago. Read more about my flirtation
with Tannat.