The Marquis
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The Marquis Inching through truck traffic as thick as molasses near the border with France, nobleman winemaker Carlos Falco fingered his cell phone. “Juli, is this normal?” he asked, hand at his ear. The two-lane road had come to a standstill. “We should be patient, don’t rush, you’ll hold the table?” Up ahead to the right lay the seaside resort of Roses on the Costa Brava and, just beyond, on a deserted stretch of rugged beach at the end of a cliffhanger road, the restaurant widely acknowledged as the world’s finest – El Bulli. Every year more than half a million adventurous palates make a play for a slot at the restaurant’s one nightly seating. Open six months of the year and with just sixty seats, for most the odds of landing a table are only slightly better than winning the lottery. An open table th
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is a bit easier to come by for the 16 Marquis of Grinon – Falco’s family titles go back to the 12 century – an old friend of El Bulli’s iconoclastic chef Ferran Adria and his longtime partner Juli Soler. Falco, whose wines are well represented on El Bulli’s wine list, has had arguably as profound an impact on the Spanish wine scene as Adria has had on the country’s cuisine. It was early July; he was making the trek to the restaurant for the ninth time since 1997, the same year El Bulli secured its third Michelin star. “The first time I came here the road was unpaved and there were campers down there on the beach,” he said as we pulled into the gravel parking lot, a half hour late for our table. “Otherwise, not much has changed.” Inside the modest dining room – ironically appointed in matronly kitsch – Falco thumbed through the voluminous wine list to the page devoted to the rich reds produced, under the Marques de Grinon label, at his lavender-scented Valdepusa estate on the arid plains of Castilla La Mancha. He ordered the wines for the evening, acknowledging the pairing challenges of a 38-course conceptual feast featuring liquefied Parmesan, oysters and hare and spun-sugar paper spackled with edible flowers. A bottle of ’96 Gosset Champagne would be followed by a crisp white from Rueda – Falco, who produces only reds, has been looking to acquire a white wine vineyard. And for the last dozen or so courses we’d be drinking his top-of-the-line Bordeaux-style Emeritus blend, a wine born of what had been – when first planted – contraband vines. The year was 1974, the last gasp of Franco’s insular dictatorship. Falco, operating a healthy business in fruit trees and tobacco plants, looked globally for inspiration as he prepared to make the leap into wine. He would borrow his grapes from France and his maverick style from California – he had spent two years pursuing a master’s in agronomy at the University of California at Davis. And to overcome his region’s climatic shortcomings – Castilla La Mancha had a reputation for producing only cheap bulk reds – he would become the first winemaker anywhere to apply Israeli drip irrigation technology to viticulture. Although at the time Spain’s restrictive wine laws forbade planting non-native grapes, Falco went ahead and replaced his grandfather’s table wine vines with cabernet sauvignon cuttings smuggled in from Bordeaux under a truckload of granny smith apple trees. Nine years later, to great acclaim, he released his first -- technically illegal – cabernet vintage (by then Falco had already become a national figure, thanks to a short-lived gossip-page marriage to Julio Iglesias’ ex-wife, Filipino stunner Isabel Preysler). Just as the Marquis’ first wines were selling out, Adria – with not much more than military cooking experience – was getting his start behind the stoves at El Bulli, then a modest family restaurant with its own miniature golf course. Experimenting in the kitchen during the long dead winters, the young chef would go on to transform the place into the world’s most thought-provoking restaurant.
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The Marquis
Meanwhile, Falco’s first renegade wine – released at the giddy height of the post-Franco cultural revolution – would go on to inspire a seismic shift in Spain’s once staid winemaking scene, now among the most dynamic in Europe. And over the last 20 years, with help from French wine consultant Michel Rolland – and the latest in vineyard computers and probes -- he has continued bucking convention, releasing Spain’s first Syrah and the first wine in the world made entirely from petit verdot (a grape found in small quantities in many grand cru Bordeaux). Well after midnight on a Tuesday in July, Falco and Adria sat together under the stars on El Bulli’s wooded deck. The chef, still amped from the dinner rush, spoke a mile a minute about the road ahead. After a decade of voracious growth – the Adria brand now includes cookware, clothing, packaged ingredients, a hotel, a catering company, a mini fast food chain, and an upscale restaurant in Madrid – he announced his intention to dial way down. “The only thing that’s ever mattered is El Bulli,” he said. “Everything else is just commerce.” Rumors he’d be hosting private upscale dinners in New York, he said, were pure nonsense (though he will make a onetime appearance in Chicago this fall, preparing a dish at a powerhouse dinner in honor of his good friend Charlie Trotter, generally speaking he never cooks for the public outside of El Bulli). Easing into his 70s, Falco, meanwhile, shows no sign at all he’s slowing things down. His new Marques de Grinon olive oil, a pet project of his dynamic daughter Xandra, will soon be in Williams Sonoma stores all across the US. And this fall, just as his refurbished winery prepares to receive – by appointment only -- its first public guests, Falco unveils his most ambitious wine yet, a limited production single vineyard Grenache under the working title, AAA. Marques de Grinon wines, imported by Moet Hennessy USA, are available at fine wine shops across the country. El Bulli accepts reservation requests for the 2008 season at www.elbulli.com.
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The Marquis
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