SEAFOOD Recipes Paired with ALBARIÑO White Wine; what could be better?

Welcome to Vino First, the show where we start with wine and then cook dishes to pair with it. Today's wine of the day is Albireño. Today we're talking about the grape Albireño, specifically Albireño from Rias Vajas, Spain. Now, if you watch our flagship show, V is for Vino, you might already know a little bit about this wine, as we featured it in one of our full travel episodes, Rias Vajas, but I wanted to revisit it because it's truly an incredible pairing wine that we can have a lot of fun with while we cook. Without further ado, let's talk about our wine of the day. Albireño is a grape that has its origins from the northwest of Spain, an area called Galicia. This area feels a lot like Ireland rather than Spain, as it's green and lush and rainy and has a lot of Celtic history. Rias Vajas is a wine area within Galicia and the name you'll see written on most wine labels. Because the grape is native to the region, it's adapted to the rainy, foggy weather there. And 90% of the vineyards grown in this region are Albireño, so they have a ton of practice at it. All the winemakers have worked together to figure out the best winemaking methods for this grape. And between the ocean breezes and the schist soil, you get a great salty minerality from the wines as well. So this is Bodegas Azlaxas, and this is their Sensum Sparkling Wine. This wine is a traditional method wine, or a champagne method wine. That's a way of doing sparkling wines that gives really fine effervescent bubbles. And it also means the wine spent a lot of time on the leaves or the dead yeast cells, and that gives this toasty creaminess to the wine some body. On the nose, you get kind of that minerality, that salty minerality. And then the palate, you get lots of fresh citrus. And so I think it's going to be a really good pairing wine. From a structure standpoint, these wines have a ton of acid. And the good news is that acid in wine is a great thing when it comes to pairing. Acidic wines go well with acidic foods, salty foods, and fatty foods. This wine also has a lighter body, so I don't want to put it with anything too heavy. I want to match the weight of the wine. I get flavors of citrus and salinity, so if I can incorporate any of those into our dish, that would be great. And I can use traditional dishes from the region, or make some classic pairings. That would be even better. All right, course number one. So for this pairing, I picked oysters. Riesweiss is really, really famous for all its seafood, but especially its shellfish, and especially its oysters. So here's the proper way to store them. Put them cup side down, put them in a bowl, cover that bowl with a wet paper towel, and put in the fridge. All right, so some tourists will say you should just have the oyster on their own. I'm okay with having a little bit of a couture mom. My favorite, that's a mignonette. Pepper, red wine vinegar, and it's shallot. What we want to do is start with this, because while we're shucking our oysters, the acid from the red wine vinegar is going to kind of mellow out those shallots a little bit. You end up getting this salt and pepper thing, right, because the oysters are salty. And now we just let that sit for a little bit while we prep our oysters. I don't know if you've ever had a lukewarm oyster before, but it's gross. So I highly recommend putting some crushed ice on a plate, shucking oysters. Cup side down, dig just far enough into the hinge to where the knife kind of sticks in, right? And then you're going to give a twist. Any luck, it'll pop. And wipe on the back of your knife. Go down the edge, cutting along the top, all the way around. Cut off the bottom. I've seen some people dump this liquid in here, but that's the gold, baby. That is where all the magic is. Number one, down. Tremendous empathy for the people who have to do this at seafood restaurants, and they have to do 200 oysters a night or whatever it might be. Basco, horseradish, lemons if you want them, and we're good to go. Oysters. Man, that is salty. Now that is good. The acid and the salt work really well together, and it brings out this fruitiness to the oyster that you didn't get before. Oh, with the wine, it's even cooler. You bring out the fruitiness with the vinegar. Bump that up for the wine. The acid and the bubbles make you get ready, and now it's like your first taste of oyster again. We want to check as many boxes as possible, and we do pretty well here. The acid in the wine goes great with the acidic mignonette, and the fatty, creamy oysters, and the salt in the oysters. Plus, we're matching flavors with the salinity and minerality in the wine with the same flavors in the oysters. Not only is it a grows together, goes together situation, since Riesbeiges is so famous for shellfish, but sparkling wine and oysters are a classic pairing. It's time for my underrated kitchen tool of the day, and today it's big old stainless steel mixing bowl. Oh, big old stainless steel mixing bowl. How I love you. I use this thing for so much. Tossing together some veggies with herbs and oil, serving a giant weeknight dinner salad. For food scraps when prepping, for shellfish discards, for marinating meat or fish, mixing batters, the possibilities are endless. The best part is that you're cheap and durable. You clean in one minute, and you even have brothers and sisters in case I need different sizes. Keep doing you, big old stainless steel mixing bowl. All right, so our next Albarino is Condes de Albaray, and this is your classic, clean, crisp style of Albarino. Honestly, it's very similar to the sparkling style, but you take out the bubbles, obviously, and then you take out the leaves aging, and so you get rid of some of that bready toastiness, and what you're left with is a clean, lots of acid, lots of citrus, salinity, a little bit of stone fruit, but a really clean, crisp wine. Medium body, so I don't want to pair it with anything too heavy, and as always, if we can incorporate some of our other pairing rules, that would be great too. Quickly before we move on, I wanted to talk to you about Vino VIP, which is our members-only group with a ton of benefits. You get early access to all our videos, including our full episodes, raffles each month for our members, a members-only section where you get behind-the-scenes and commentary videos. Plus, we do quarterly hangouts with me. We have a members-only Facebook group, and most importantly, it just really helps support us. We're independently produced, so we want to keep being able to make videos for you. Membership starts at just $5 a month, and it'd mean the world if you'd consider signing up. Thanks. All right, you may know cheese boards, and you may know our charcuterie boards. I've even seen butter boards, but I think the king of boards are conservus boards. Conservus are tinned fish. Like tomatoes, they are canned and tinned at the peak of freshness. This area, Rias Bajas, makes the most amount of tinned fish, I think, in all of Europe, and some of the most in the world. If you get good Spanish conservus, there's all different types. I've got tuna belly, I've got mussels, I've got cockles, I've got razor clams, and they do octopus, they do squid. If you're in the United States, you can order all of this from a place called Despana. They're a Spanish specialty store in New York City, and they'll ship right to you. Not only do they have conservus, but they have everything here. These are some really good giant white beans, olives, peppers. They sent me some local Rias Bajas cheese. Look at these potato chips. This is the coolest tin of potato chips I've ever seen. So that being said, I'm going to make the board, and then we'll try it. We're going to start the board by making some pinchos, which are little skewers. And these are called pinchos guilda, which are manzanilla olive, anchovy, and guindilla peppers. Next, we'll do the stars of the show, the conservus. Mussels in spicy vinegar, tuna belly in pesto, sardines in oil, and cockles and razor clams in brine. We'll put a hunk of our cheese and some of our white beans on there for some fat. The key to a good board is a mix of textures and types of flavors, so let's add some fresh cucumbers and spicy radish, and some pickled cornichons and lemons for acid. Finally, let's fill up the in-between spaces with some vessels, sourdough bread, Spanish crackers, breadsticks, and our patatas fritas. Some skewers for grabbing. Oh, and I almost forgot our Marcona almonds. Look how gorgeous this is. First of all, look how pretty they package these fish. I mean, look at the layers there, the detail. And all of them come in different sauces and oils. One of my favorites, these are cockles. They're kind of like clams. This is tuna belly. Mussels, again, look at how pretty they are. This is a razor clam. If you haven't seen me try to open one of these in our Ria's Bites this episode, you're missing out. You need to go watch how ridiculous I look trying to get one of these to come out of its shell. With the wine, salinity, and citrus flavor in the wine, it's like you're squeezing a little bit of lemon and putting a little salt on the dish. The acid cleanses your palate. It's a lot of fun. With any mixed board with a lot going on, cheese, meat, fish, whatever, high acid wines are best. For instance, they'll play well with the acid in the pickled items and the citrus, cut through the fatty mussels and oily fish like sardines, and the salt from the cheese or chips and nutty items. We did a good job matching our weight again, as this board has a bit more body, kind of like our wine. We're matching the citrusy flavors with our citrus and the lemons and the vinegar and some of our conservas. And again, this is a classic pairing for a region where they make both the wine and the food. All right, we have one more course and a few more wines that we forgot. Welcome to the V is for Vino nerd lab. We take complicated wine topics and make them simple. Today's topic is wine enclosures. Wine enclosures. Natural corks, synthetic corks, screw tops, glass, paper towels, your finger. There are a lot of ways to close a wine bottle. Which way is right is a hard answer, but I can definitely tell you which ways are wrong. You see, before these enclosures, wine bottles were typically sealed using oiled rags or wooden plugs, which left the wine, well, tasting like an oily rag or a wooden plug. Plus, the wine simply couldn't age. And the reason was oxygen. The rags and the wood allowed too much air into the bottle. Oxygen is kind of a strange thing. It's the enemy of wine until it isn't. In the cellar, you want to control it. Some oxygen is okay as part of your winemaking style, though many winemakers allow no oxygen at all. In the bottle, you want a little, but not too much. If there's no oxygen, your wine will be what's called reductive and over the long term have flavors of rotten eggs and burnt rubber, but too much and the wine turns to vinegar. Proper enclosures help regulate this oxygen transmission. We can categorize enclosures into four main types. First, we have classic corks, which have a 250 year history of enclosing wine bottles. This is the only true cork as cork is a natural product that comes from cork trees, mostly from Spain and Portugal. And the cool thing is that it's a completely renewable resource. They strip the trees once every nine years, and then the cork grows again. Corks are recyclable, they seal well for fairly long periods of time, and they give you that classic quintessential pop when you open them. Ah, music to my ears. And most importantly, corks allow the transfer of tiny amounts of oxygen into the wine, about a milligram per year. So what's the problem with corks? Well, there's a few. First off, they're relatively expensive compared to other options. Second, every cork is like a unique snowflake. Because they're a naturally occurring material, different corks allow different amounts of oxygen in. This means that from bottle to bottle, the wine may develop at different rates. And the biggest problem, in my opinion, is something called TCA, or this thing, which I'm not going to try and pronounce. All you need to know is that it affects about 3% of wine corks. That doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that equates to about one bottle in every three cases of wine. So chances are you've likely opened up a tainted bottle or two. And when a wine has cork taint, there's no saving it. In its mildest forms, it makes the wine flavors taste muted, and the wine will just taste flat. If it's intense, the wine will smell like wet cardboard or musty basement. And the older the wine gets, the worse the effects become. There's nothing worse than saving a bottle for 20 years and finding out it's ruined with cork taint. Still, 70% of all wines use cork, and it's the most proven option for wines that need to age long term. Out of curiosity, what are our enclosure alternatives? The synthetic cork is just what it sounds like, fake cork. Usually some combination of foam and plastic, but sometimes plant-based, meant to emulate the real deal. With this option, cork taint is no longer an issue, and they're still recyclable, much cheaper, and over the last few years, they've gotten better at regulating oxygen. But nobody likes them. I'm sorry, synthetic corks. They feel cheap, they look cheap, they're associated with cheap wines, so most serious winemakers won't use them, especially for long-term aging. Screwtop enclosures, the most popular brand being Stelvin, have some hardcore advocates in the wine world and are totally underrated. First off, no cork taint. Second, they're incredibly consistent. Screwtops are machine-made, and that little plastic part inside the cap can regulate oxygen to a winemaker's exact specifications. The problem? A few. They're only somewhat recyclable, they aren't natural, and people still associate them with cheap wines. And while they should regulate oxygen in theory, they've only been around for 30-ish years, so they aren't quite proven yet for super long-term storage. These glass stoppers are showstoppers. They look good. No TCA with this option, and they protect the wine. But they're a very specific choice, as they dramatically change the overall look and feel of a bottle. Plus, they're expensive, and they add weight to the wine, not ideal when it comes to shipping. They also don't allow much oxygen in, so they're really only used for wines that are consumed young. And that's not it. There are even more wine enclosures. Crown caps, Helix, Zorks, Twiggles, and Blurbs. But we're out of time. For me, I'd say for the 90% of wines on the planet that are meant to be consumed in 5 years or less, screwcaps are great. And for long-term aging, I'll take my chances with cork. That is, if I ever get the chance. I hope you enjoyed this Nerd Lab on wine enclosures. As always, keep geeking out. All right, so we do have one last tile of Albarino to talk about, and that's kind of your richer style. This is Attis Albarino, and I love this because it spends six months on the lees and some of its fermentation in oak. What you get is a rich, creamy wine, but you still get these bright fruit characters. Now, your fruit character is starting to get in the tropical land. I'm starting to get some mango, some pineapple, but you still get a nice, fresh wine. And then what you have here is Pato de Cenderaz, and this is their top cuvee, and it's really, really special. It spends up to 30 months on the lees, the dead yeast cells, and they don't release it for at least 5 years after the bottle. And so you get an aged Albarino, and it is magical. It is rich and complex and dense without being super heavy. That being said, these are fuller-bodied wines, right? These are medium plus body. We want to try and do a dish that has a little more weight to it and can stand up to these wines and pair nicely. For our last dish, we're going to do shrimp and grits. This is very common in what they call low country, which is Georgia and South Carolina. Now, it's very common in brunch. By the way, Albarino from Riaz Baez just partnered with 12 chefs to create this great recipe book, which is where I adapted this recipe from. I'll put the link to the free book in the description. We've got three basic components to this dish. One is an option, but I kind of like it. That's the quick pickled Fresno peppers. And I like that they have this really great, sweet, fruity, tropical heat. We're going to tone down the spice by the quick pickle by adding a lot of sugar. Quarter cup. Good pinch of salt. Let's cover it with some white wine vinegar. Get them to boil. Dissolve the sugar and salt. And then we're just going to let them sit. We'll jar them and we'll cool them. So here we go. Grits are stone ground corn. These are not instant grits, because if I learned anything from my cousin Vinny, it's that no self-respecting southerner uses instant grits. You have to take pride in your grits. Chicken broth, low sodium, because I like to control the sodium. I can always add salt, but I can't take it away like a haircut, right? And get it boiling. All right. In the meantime, let's start on our shrimp. Get the big guys. You are worth it. And it's going to make a nice, pretty presentation. Just a little bit of vegetable oil. We're going to go Cajun style with our seasonings. A little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper, some oregano, a little thyme, prika, a little bit of cayenne, and a good amount of garlic powder. Also, all that stuff that's on the shrimp, all that flavor is going to go into the sauce, which is really nice. Boiling. So what we're going to do is take one cup of our grits. We'll turn it on low, maybe five to ten minutes. Now, we need to prep for our sauce. Onion, pepper, clove of garlic, thick cut bacon, and I'm just going to cut this up into some pieces. I'm also going to give myself just a little bit of parsley. To me, grits are done when they are creamy without being mushy. When that happens, that's when we're going to add our butter, we're going to add some cheese, and then we're going to taste it, and I'm going to see if it needs salt. In the meantime, I'm going to clean up and I'm going to prep for our plating. Now, I'm going to turn around, I'm going to finish the grits, and we're going to do the sauce. I don't want it super high, medium, medium low. Put just a hair of oil. What we want is for the bacon to render out its fat. That's where we want the oil from. Our bacon, looking nice and crispy, and look at all that fat in the corner there. Let's crank it up, baby. This is not going to take long. As soon as they start turning pink, you're pretty much almost there. Now look at all that great flavor we have on the bottom. We're going to use that. That's called fond. All right, so our peppers, onions are going. Once they were almost translucent, the onions, I added the garlic. I'm letting it just get nice and happy. In a minute, we're going to deglaze, which means we're going to hit it with some wine, and we're going to scrape all that fond on the bottom up and really get that flavor into the sauce. Our wine's almost gone there. Let's hit it with a little bit of lemon juice and a quarter stick of butter. We're ready to plate. A little playpen for our shrimp and all our sauce. Bacon, onion, parsley, pepper, all that Cajun seasoning from our shrimp. Take a little bit of that sauce. Our Fresnos, don't forget. Old tried and true pepper grinder, and you have shrimp and grits. Creamy grits, the salt from the cheese, the sauce with that acid, and then the richness from these onions, smokiness from the bacon, and then that little bit of heat from the Fresno. The tropical fruity wine plays off the spiced notes, the Cajun spice in the shrimp, but the acid's still there, so the acid cuts through the fat. Delicious. This is definitely a fairly heavy dish, so we match the weight of our rich, medium-plus body wine. The acid cut through the cheesy, fatty grits and bacon fat, played with the salty cheese and shrimp, and the Cajun spiced shrimp and spicy Fresno peppers played off the stone and tropical fruit notes in the wine. Almost like a sweet, spicy combo. And there it is. Vino first with Albarino from Rias Bajas, Spain. We had fun pairing our oysters with a sparkling Albarino, our conservice board with a lighter style, and then our shrimp and grits with a richer style of Albarino. It's really a versatile pairing wine, and it's one of the reasons I love it so much. I'm really curious for you to try these recipes. Post your experience in the comments, and let me know how they turn out. We'll see you next time on Vino First.