Wine Time

Winning While Wining

The Joy of Sampling Local Ingredients and Great Wines

by Trevor Burton photography by Trevor Burton

We headed in the direction of calamari

Over the years, my wife, Mary Ellen, and I have spent a good bit of time in California’s wine country. It’s fun and satisfying getting to know winemakers and to discover their wines. To me, wine always tastes better when you’re sharing it with the person who crafted it. An added benefit to visiting wine country is searching out and trying some local restaurants. A tasty adventure. We stay away from haute cuisine if it’s available. We stick to a tried-andtrue strategy of seeking out small, bistro-like places. What we yearn for is local ingredients that have been well-looked-after in the kitchen and served in a cozy environment. Of course, local wines are a key ingredient. We found just the place in the town of Healdsburg in northern Sonoma.

Bravas is an old house converted into a tapas bistro. The nice thing about tapas dishes is that one can experience a wide choice of menu items without filling up after the first dish or two. What appealed to us was a chance to do a lot of food and wine pairings; almost all Bravas’ wines are available by the glass, making it easy to pair with a variety of foods.

Right away, we found something interesting. Mary Ellen is a big fan of wines from the Rías Baixas region in the northwestern tip of Spain — wines made from the Albariño grape. Given the Spanish influence at Bravas, it was no great surprise to find one on the wine list. What tickled us was finding a local Albariño on the list. This one was from the Russian River Valley, another favorite wine region. We made a comparison, ordering a couple of tapas dishes and a glass of each of the wines to share with each other.

For the record, the dishes we ordered were a platter of local cheeses along with a kale salad — both superb — but it was the wine where the real interest lay. The two Albariños were enjoyable but completely different: different regions, different wines. We won’t go into details of our tasting notes, we’ll just leave it that the experience was unique and interesting.

My wife is an avid aficionado of calamari. So, we headed in that direction. That turned out to be another surprise, a very pleasant one. We’re used to ordering calamari as an appetizer at Italian restaurants, deep fried and crispy. What turned up at Bravas was nothing like that. It was small, Monterey squid, grilled and served with salsa verde, grilled lemon and a little mint. Quite different from what we expected, and absolutely delicious. We opted for a local Zinfandel for our wine.

Our finale was a departure from the tapas theme. We shared a paella. The dish was listed on the menu as Spanish Bomba Rice with Sonoma Flavors. Bomba rice is the most common rice used in paella in Spain. As for the Sonoma flavors, there were mussels, squid and peppers. To us it was a great combination of Barcelona and Healdsburg. Very nice.

As I said, Bravas offers most wines by the glass and there was one we could not pass up. Vino de Pago is a classification for Spanish wine applied to individual vineyards or wine estates. Currently, there are just a few of them. Bravas’ wine, from the Valencia region, was offered by the glass. That’s pretty special and something we couldn’t resist pairing with our paella. A winner while wining, right up our alley.