Spanish Wines at Solera

Not so long ago Solera, which sits on the slightly seedy corner of 9th and Hennepin, was chosen by Food & Wine Magazine as one of the ten best new restaurants in—not the neighborhood, the state, or the country, but the WORLD. This is the kind of honor that it’s difficult for even a restaurant critic to verify empirically. As for the rest of us, we’ll just have to consider that the place is out of the ordinary is some way, and probably a little too pricey to fully enjoy without a gift certificate. In fact, on my only previous visit to the place, four of us sat on the rooftop terrace, drank a few glasses of house wine, ate some lomo and corn nuts, and walked away with a bill of $130.00.

But the decor of Solera is stunning. The designers have tapped into that beautiful style-zone associated with turn-of-the-century Barcelona. It lies in the same culture-strata as Art Noveau and Arts and Crafts, but it’s neither so monotonously swirly as the former, nor so puritanically boxy as the latter. It makes use of mosaic tiles and beautiful glass and ingeniously bent wrought-iron, but the balance between curves and angles is sound, and the palette is full of Fauve colors: deep blue, bright orange, evergreen, and tomato red. We sense an unabashed delight in fanciful handmade shapes, but also a robust and down-to-earth assertiveness that elevates the style well above the often slightly precious stuff of the period.

Not that Solera is in any way a period reconstruction. It’s a slick modern establishment based on the odd Spanish idea—to which I, for one, subscribe—that people enjoy sitting around eating small dishes of finger food, drinking, and chattering away. This may explain why, when some friends alerted me to an upcoming tasting of Spanish wines to be held at Solera, at a very reasonable price, I was quick to secure reservations.

And so it happened that my friend Tim and I walked into the banquet room on the third floor of Solera one Saturday afternoon, like two kids in a candy store. There were tables lined up along all four walls, each of which had been set up by a local wine importer. And there were bottles lined up along each of the tables. We were handed a catalogue listing the 350-odd wines that confronted us, and a large clean wine glass to use in exploring them.

I took one look at the catalogue and stuffed it into my back pocket. It was clear that the organizers had made a terrible mistake. The catalogue was organized by grape-type, rather than by importer. This meant that when standing in front of a particular table—let’s say the table exhibiting the wines imported by Grand Pere—you would be confronted by a number of wines—Penèdes, La Mancha, Jerez—which would be listed on pages widely scattered throughout the book, alongside other wines from the same region. No doubt there were some in the crowd who made use of the catalogue to record tasting notes, but they were very few, and very diligent. With one hand holding a wine glass, and no convenient place to write, the very idea struck me as preposterous.

In any case, Spanish wines are not the stuff to be analyzed with a score-sheet. Spain makes a great deal of wine, and some of it is very good, but we look to Spain for beautiful, inexpensive wines that carry a regional integrity that cheaper blended wines from California sometimes lack. We look to the Rioja region in particular, which has been the star of Spanish wines for more than a century, for wines with a little of the elegance and refinement of a decent Bordeaux, but with those added dimensions of leather and tar and earth that bespeak the no-nonsense integrity of the region.

It has long been a cliché—there is more to Spanish wines than Rioja. And of course it’s true. Whether you can find these wines at a local liquor store is another matter, but it’s definitely becoming easier. Riojas made up perhaps a quarter of the wines available at the Solera tasting, with the Ribera del Duero district a healthy runner-up. Other regions from Penedès to Priorat have made their way into the consciousness of inquisitive wine drinkers. They were all there, along with obscure whites from Galicia and half-decent reds from the heart of Valdespeñas.

In any case, at an event of this sort half the fun is chatting with the women and men behind the tables, who are eager to share their expertise, and do not expect much in the way of background or intelligence in reply. Early on in the afternoon, when the place was half-deserted, we chatted at some length with a woman representing The Wine Doctor. She’d moved to Minneapolis a few years ago from Valencia, and to judge from the catalogue listings, her firm now dominates the local trade in Valencian wine—such as it is. She introduced us to the mysteries of the Merseguera grape, and the Bobal, and we made our way through her flight of refreshing vintages, all of which were unknown to us, perhaps a little too eagerly.

A red-haired gentleman from New France Imports had a gentle demeanor and a serious expression, and an array of wines to match. I sampled a Tondonia Gran Reserve Bianco 1968, and was duly impressed to find that a 35-year-old Spanish white was still drinkable. As I sipped we discussed the decline of Marques de Riscal, and the tenaciousness of a very few wineries who continue to make their wines the “old” way, with no heat control, years in old oak, and a few more in the bottle. Now most Spanish wines are made for immediate consumption, which makes a certain amount of sense, considering that most wines—Spanish or otherwise—are consumed immediately after purchase.

The Spread

An hour into the festival, Tim and I had sampled perhaps twenty or twenty-five wines—the pours are very small—and when the food arrived we were among the first in line to sample it. Roasted red peppers stuffed with cheese, thin slices of ham wrapped around delicious bread-sticks, stuffed dates, marinated olives, grilled baby asparagus. Without exception the tapas were wonderful, and the only drawback was that it was impossible to get a glass of wine to go along with them. (I felt like the Ancient Mariner!) You could get a sip but not a glass, and by the time you’d returned to your spot at the tiny stand-up tables in the center of the room, that sip would be gone. Only the punchbowl full of icy bottles of spring water saved the day.

In time Hilary and Carol arrived, and after another trip through the food line we finally abandoned our choice spot near the feeding trough and went off to visit a few of the tables we’d previously overlooked. The hall was now teaming with men and women—young, middle-aged, old—many of them elegantly or flashily dressed for a night on the town. Eyes had long since begun to glisten and noise levels were rising to greater and greater heights. Though the servers behind the tables seemed to be holding up well, their gracious disquisitions on the merits of the Albariño grape and the rosy future of the Ribera del Duero region were growing a little stale through repitition.

Finally, with palates all but numb, we took the elevator upstairs to the fifth-floor rooftop terrace, sat down at an empty table, and ordered a bottle of the house white (from Castile) and a plate of sliced meats. We could dimly hear the throbbing mechanical soundtrack of the owner’s “private mix” above the more agreeable throbbing of the city. Buildings towered above us and the hum of urban life rose up on every side. Ah solitude! Ah peace!

We agreed that the event had been well organized, and altogether worthwhile. I’m not sure that I learned a great deal—then again, a week-long seminar could hardly have done justice to the variety and intricacy of the Spanish wines that had been gathered together in that single room. I know that I sampled several wines that lie far above my ordinary zone of intake—the two vintages of Vega Sicilia’s Alion line, for example.

But conversation soon moved on to other, more personal matters, and as we sat reminiscing about cities in Spain that we’d visited, or would like to have visited, and perhaps will one day visit—from Albarracin to Merida, from Vejer de la Frontera to Cadaques—it was brought home to me that there is a good deal to be said for sipping a glass of wine—any wine—at one’s leisure, with friends, and simply watching the world go by.