WineTasteTV - Offering Wine Education and Information Videos

365 Days  


What Wine Goes with Tapas? Some Thoughts, Sort of, from Tapeo on Newbury Street

Posted 08/18/2008 at 11:31 AM by Cathy

Dining outside, especially along Newbury Street late one sunny summer afternoon, makes it awfully hard to be introspective.

With so much looking out, looking around, looking up, and looking down, it's difficult to look in to your response to wine. Or even to be terribly observant about it.

We decided to put our noses to the grindstone anyway. Focus, we told ourselves.

Dutifully we put our noses in the menus. And then we just about gave up hope.

Tapeo Restaurant and Tapas Bar offers a choice of fifty – fifty – small plates to choose from. Plus, during Restaurant Week, they're offering flights of red wines and white wines. (At $10 per flight of three wines, and heavy pours, it's the deal of the city.)

Flights are the oenological equivalent of tapas: little tastes, easily shared. But that's the thing about drinking several wines at a tapas place. Frequent revisits to both food and wine are inevitable, which means the combinations multiply exponentially very quickly.

It wasn't palate fatigue, exactly, because from a mouth's perspective tapas dishes with a flight of wine is happy, happy adrenaline.

Palate confusion, or palate distraction, may be more accurate. With so much variety, and so much variation of sequence, tastes start to blur.

Take the 2003 Casillero del Diablo Cabernet Sauvignon from Rioja, Spain, the second of the three wines in the red flight. It got a little lost. Not that it didn't have personality. It did. There's just nothing superlative reaching out to distinguish it from the rest of the line-up, which included a 2006 Casillero del Diablo Carmenere from the Rapel Valley in Chile (very smooth) and the 2007 Sierra Cantabria Crianza Tempranillo from Chile's Central Valley (which was a little stiffer, and had a little more grip).

There's something about tapas that makes me remember how hungry I am – I keep going back for me – and there's something about flights that makes me feel bittersweet toward the wines involved. I am most glad to have a selection of tastes, though sometimes – like when I'm dining along Newbury Street with delicious tapas, pitches of Sangria, and sexy accents all around me – my discipline for methodically tasting the wines tends to wilt.

Anyone who's been there will understand. And probably think I'm crazy for even trying.

Email Icon E-Mail | Digg Icon Digg this! | del.icio.us del.icio.us
RSS Icon 365 Days RSS | RSS Icon Comments RSS for this post

 

Comments

No comments have been posted for this article.

About the Author

Cathy Huyghe
Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.

Subscribe via Email

Get 365 Days updates by adding your email address here:

Recent Posts

Archives

My Scr�gy Profile
Sip on this:
It’s all Greek to me. Agiorgitiko or St. George? Find the Answer
 

Video Index