Gerry Dawes, who is a contributor to this newsletter, has just published a remarkable new book, Sunset in a Glass: Adventures of a Food and Wine Road Warrior in Spain, a journey that is not just the most comprehensive guide to Spanish food culture but imbues it with the passion of someone who fell in thrall with the country and its people decades ago. He is that most intrepid of reporters, asking every question an outsider needs to ask to make ancient traditions clear. I suspect he knows more about Spanish wines and food than most Spaniards who have nothing close to his intimacy with each and every region.

                                         Photo by Kathleen Balun

How did your fascination with Spain begin?  And how did James Michener's book affect you?

On January 2, 1968, not long after daylight broke, our military plane, near the end of an overnight flight from McGwire Air Force Base in New Jersey, banked near El Puerto de Santa María and I got my first glimpse of Spain. Below, I saw whitewashed buildings amid palm trees set in a sea of stubby vines—now bare of leaves in mid-winter—surrounded by stark white soil. As I would learn later, the Navy base at Rota was near the sherry vineyards between Jerez de la Frontera and Sanlúcar de Barrameda. As the plane circled before landing, I also could not help noticing circular enclosures, which I would learn were bullrings, including the big one at El Puerto de Santa María and a couple of smaller ones, which I would one day find first-hand are used to test young fighting cows for bravery. Spain was already beginning to fascinate me and I had not even touched the ground. In 1968, Michener’s Iberia was published. American matador-artist John Fulton and his housemate, Robert Vavra, who took the photographs for Iberia, figured prominently in this best-selling non-fiction book. I purchased a copy and learned that they lived in Sevilla, just over an hour north of Rota. One night in a legendary flamenco joint in Sevilla, I met Fulton and he gave me his phone number and asked me to visit him.  Iberia would become like a post-U. S. Navy yearbook to me.  Eventually, 20 people whom Michener (right) wrote about in Iberia signed my copy. Fulton and Vavra had also known Ernest Hemingway and many of his entourage. By the time I met them because of Iberia they had achieved legendary status among hispanophiles.  Knowing them had a profound impact on my life and selling Fulton’s paintings and Vavra’s books allowed me to stay in Spain after I was discharged from the Navy.

 

You were trained by the U.S. Navy to learn Russian. Did you pick up Spanish on your own?

 

Since I never got to use Russian, except for military terminology, after I left the Navy, I began to lose it as Spanish took over.  I began speaking Spanish to get along in southern Spain, taking trains, ordering food and drinks and gradually moved into pidgin Spanish. Then I took a class on the base and began to visualize the words I was hearing.  At the University of Sevilla a couple of my classes were in Spanish and as I acquired more and more Spanish friends, such as my friend Juan Alonso, who became the best man at my wedding, I became more and more fluent.

 

How did you earn a living in Spain in the beginning?

In 1970, the first year I lived in Sevilla, to make ends meet, I began to sell the artwork of John Fulton. I also did some writing and photography and contributed pieces to the English-language magazine Guidepost in Madrid. And I got $250 per month from the G. I. Bill to attend classes through an American program at the University of Sevilla.

 

What changes were there in Spanish gastronomy after the death of Franco?

First off, Basque chefs such as Juan Mari Arzak began using French nouvelle cuisine techniques with nueva cocina vasca, which later morphed into a unique Spanish cocina de vanguardia, avant-garde, Catalan Ferran Adrià-influenced, Michelin star-driven cuisine (right).  Also, smaller family and small producer winemakers began to emerge, many of them growers who pulled out of the cooperatives that were promoted by the Franco regime.  During Franco, there were almost no artisan cheese makers, because the regime dictated that almost all cheeses be made in cooperatives.  Now there are hundreds of terrific Spanish artisan cheeses.

 

Describe the best way to go on a progressive tapas evening.

 

Well, with me.  Faulting that, stake out an easily walkable area in a city like Madrid, Sevilla or San Sebastián, for instance.   In Madrid, you can go to Cava Baja and the area around the Plaza Mayor, but the most de moda, sexy tapas bars are beyond Retiro Park in the area around the Ibiza Metro station.  In Sevilla, there are routes in the Barrio de Santa Cruz, the Old Jewish Quarter, and in Triana and many other areas of this lovely tapas-oriented city. 
      In San Sebastián, the Old Quarter is still one of the best places for pintxos, (tapas) bars.  Check out places that seem to be packed with locals, be patient, watch what some of them are ordering and ask to try a couple of dishes, which will likely be single small oval china plates for one person.  Larger plates of that same tapas are called raciones (sharing portions) and priced accordingly.  If you’re a tourist, you may be fine after two or three of these spots, where you have a beer or a glass of wine at each stop.   I used to have a route in Sevilla that started in the Barrio de Santa Cruz, where I lived, and ended in Triana.  There were eleven bars on my trail.  It helped that I was young and had an ample capacity for drink.  The exercise from walking from bar to bar, a kilometer or two across the city, helped.

 

When did Spanish wines enter the modern era and on the global market as a real force?

A group of Madrid wine writers began to emerge and, as with so much in the post-Franco era, the measure was that everything new had to be good and everything traditional to be re-evaluated and, often, fell into disfavor as part of the old regime.  For instance, those great old Rioja Reservas and Gran Reservas began to lose ground to new oak-laced, high alcohol fruit bombs and city apartment-dwelling wine writers who had visited far fewer Spanish wineries than I had began to make Robert Parkerista pronouncements about what good wine should taste like.  They were wrong, but they set the palate for what to me are many unpalatable wines, though highly rated wines, for a whole generation.

You have crusaded for a long time against high alcohol wines. Are there many Spanish producers who are deliberately making such wines? 

Of course, Spain has always been a hot country, but the best wines came then, and still do, from the Atlantic-influenced north. Rioja, for instance, had beautiful long-lived Gran Reservas that were 12%-12.5% alcohol.  Now many Rioja wines, and most of Ribera del Duero red, top 14% and even reach 15%.  The difference between 12.5% and 15% is 20% more alcohol by volume in a bottle, meaning that you are getting a liter’s worth of alcohol, instead of the amount in a 12.5% 750ml. bottle.  I do not drink wine for the alcohol. If I want to get on a piss, Tequila is faster—and cheaper.

 

What was the influence of Ferran Adrià? Was modernist and molecular cuisine just a marketing fad? And how much affect has been lasting?

Any culinary movement that achieves notice develops the marketing value of what they are doing, from Ferran to food trucks.  In the first place, as I wrote in a chapter in Sunset in a Glass, Ferran and the Spanish cocina de vanguardia chefs never used the term “molecular cuisine.” That was a term coined at a conference by a food science expert in the early 2000s.  The effect of modernist Spanish cuisine was enormous on a world-wide scale.  Because of Ferran Adrià, partly driven by the first major article about him, el Bulli and his food that I wrote for Food Arts in 1997, according to my editor Jim Poris, young chefs began going to Spain seeking to do stages with Ferran and other vanguardia chefs, such as Arzak (left), Juan Roca and others. Not all these chefs could even get a reservation to eat in el Bulli, much less a couple of months working in the modern cuisine kitchens, but they sampled a lot of modern Spanish food and ate in a lot of traditional cuisine restaurants and tapas bars.  All of this rubbed off and those young chefs seeking new ideas came back to the States after trips to Spain and began to open tapas bars, which required less dinero than a full-bore restaurant, and that led to the proliferation of tapas restaurants we enjoy today in the U. S.

 

What are the centers of the most interesting gastronomy in Spain right now?

Of course, San Sebastiàn, which is more parochially Basque influenced, and Barcelona and Catalunya, with more of an international outlook, but also very exciting are the restaurants that have emerged in the Levante, Valencia and Alicante, in the past two decades.  The cuisine of talented Levante region chefs such as three-star Quique Dacosta in Denia (Alicante), perhaps the most vanguardia-driven of all Spanish chefs; the great Kiko Moya at L’Escaleta with exquisite wine and cheese service by his cousin Alberto Redrado: and Maria José San Roman, queen of olive oil, saffron and bread baking, with her Michelin-starred Monastrel restaurant and La Taberna del Gourmet, one of the greatest and most important tapas restaurants in Spain.  In Valencia, Emiliano and his son Alejandro’s Casa Montaña (founded in 1835) is one of the best product-driven tapas restaurants anywhere. This region also has such pilgrimage-worthy restaurants in inland Alicante province (where L’Escaleta is located) as chef Mari Carmen Vélez’s modernist cuisine and has an exceptional product-driven tapas menu as well.The legendary desserts chef and chocolatier Paco Torreblanca also has his cooking school and plants in neighboring Monóver (where the mythical Poveda Fondillón dessert wine is made).  And a few kilometers more inland is one of the most remarkable family-run traditional cuisine restaurants in Spain, Casa Eliás in Xinorlet, which specializes in arroces en paella with wild rabbit and mountain snails cooked over grape vine cuttings.  This entire region offers some of the world’s greatest and most delicious rice dishes, not all of them paellas, which is the name of the pan.

 

What do you think are the three or five best restaurants in Spain at the moment? 

Extebarri (right) and Elkano in the Basque Country; D’Berto, among the best seafood restaurants on the planet, in Galicia; the restaurants along Bajo de Guía beach in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, especially Bigote and Mirador de Doñana; Can Majó in Barcelona for seafood;  El Campero for almadraba tuna and other great seafood dishes in Barbate (Cádiz) next to the town where José Andrés spends his summer vacations, Zahara de los Atunes; the bar at Marisquería Rafa and my beloved Casa Lucio in Madrid.  All product-, not technique-, driven cuisine.  I could go on, but we do not have the space.

 

Why have you been so critical of the Michelin Guide’s ratings of restaurants in Spain?

It is a tire company, using a paper guidebook to sell tires.  Why do you think Japan, with so many car manufacturers suddenly had so many Michelin rosettes bestowed on its restaurants?  All those cars need tires.  Michelin bestows some 1,700 rosettes on French restaurants, while Spain is given a mere 200+.  These two countries are in competition for gastro tourism Euros.  Until it is awarded at least a thousand more stars, which its restaurants deserve, Spain should boycott Michelin tires to see which Michelin wants to sell most, rubber or paper, their tires or their highly biased paper Guide Michelin.

 

What are the best Spanish restaurants in the United States?

Ibiza Kitchen in Chappaqua, New York; James Campbell Caruso’s La Boca in Santa Fe.  Probably, Curate in North Carolina. But I am not the best person to ask.  I go to Spain so much and live in upstate New York, so I have

NEW YORK CORNER

To read previous chapters of ANOTHER VERMEER, go to the archive

CHAPTER 14

 

 

         As it had been the year before when David met Katie at Fordham University in the Bronx, the day was brilliant, with a dazzling sun tussling with silver-rimmed clouds while swirls of autumn leaves blew in the wind gusts on the Gothic-style Rose Hill campus. 

         David had never made it through college, while Katie was a distinguished student among a legacy of famous Fordham graduates that included authors Don DeLillo and Paddy Chayefsky, actors Alan Alda and Denzel Washington, Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro and Coach Vince Lombardi.  When Katie attended there was still a sizeable complement of Jesuit priests, whose order founded the school in 1841, later evolving into a university.

         They had been very happy years for Katie in college, and she was about to visit one of her favorite professors, Dr. Karl Mundt, who had escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager and became very well known for his work on modern European history.

         Prof. Mundt welcomed Katie, always one of his favorite students, who he so wished would have gone on to grad school to become a teacher, and he remembered David from his visit the year before.  Prof. Mundt’s English was impeccable, with only the slightest trace of a German accent, and his bearing was patrician, if a little stooped over now. Katie had never seen him without a jacket and tie.

         “So, come in, come in,” he said, “Excuse the mess.  It seems the grad school theses get thicker all the time,” then he winked, “and more boring.”

         Prof. Mundt shared his office with a professor of Asian history, whom he introduced as Helen Liu, a woman not much older than Katie, with short black hair, glasses and wearing a deep blue pants suit.

         “Katie was one of my best students,” Prof. Mundt told Prof. Liu.  “I always told her she should get her doctorate and teach.”

       He asked Katie how her family was—her father was a lawyer, her mother a teacher—then said, “So, you have come not just to see your old professor but to solve some mystery for you about Jan Vermeer?”

         “No real mystery,” said Katie, “but I need some historical insight into some details about this painting of Vermeer that’s coming up for auction.” 

         “Ah, yes, I read about this in the papers a few weeks ago,” he said. “So I took the liberty of calling a very fine expert on Renaissance art—Professor Elizabeth Horner—to join us in the conference room,” then, turning to Prof. Liu, asked, “And would you like to join us, Helen?”

         “Love to,” she said. “I’m an admirer of Vermeer.”

         The four of them went into a nearby room with a long, wide oak table, where Prof. Horner, a woman of about fifty with  graying hair tied in a pony tail, owl-like glasses, and wearing a brown skirt and beige v-neck blouse, was waiting. She had brought along a large, recently published full-color book of all Vermeer’s known paintings. After introductions, Katie removed the photo from the folder and showed it to Prof. Mundt.

          “So, this it, eh?”  He pored over the photo, his eyes moving up, down and across. “Hmm, it looks like a Vermeer, but I’m no expert on that.  What do you think, Elizabeth?”

         The art professor squinted and said, “It’s not a bad print for a black-and-white photo, but without color and texture it’s impossible to say,” noting the similarities to the two known Vermeers The Astronomer and The Geographer, which she’d  already displayed from the book.  “Both of those were painted in 1668, and the man in the picture seems the same in all three.  The room with the casement window is the same one Vermeer used for almost all his paintings. And there’s the globe that’s also in the others.”

         Prof. Mundt nodded and nodded, then said, “Well, I think someone got the title wrong.”

         Katie and David both said, “What?”

         “He is a chemist, but from the tools he’s working with, it appears he is an alchemist.  Do you remember, Katie, I always said, to find the answer you must always look at the context first? See here?”

         The professor pointed to two vessels in the painting connected by a tube. “That’s an alembic, which was used to try to turn chemicals into gold.  This first vessel is called a cucurbit in which the chemical is boiled to create vapor that goes up into the tube and into the other vessel.”

         David remembered working with something like that in high school chemistry class and also in illustrations of how whiskey is made.

         “Now, this,” continued Prof. Mundt, “is called a Hessian crucible (left), made of clay, which was invented in the Hesse region of Germany in the late Middle Ages. It can heat up to very high temperatures, which you need in metallurgy.”

         David asked, somewhat sheepishly, “Did any of these alchemists ever actually succeed in turning another metal into gold?”

         “No, but it was not for lack of trying by the most intelligent scientists and minds of the age, especially in the 17th century, which corresponds to Vermeer’s time.  Alchemy goes much further back in history, of course, to Egypt and India, but a brilliant British scientist named John Dee was most influential in the 17th century for his work on alchemy, which he publishedin 1564 as Monas Hieroglyphica.”

         “And he came close to making it work?” asked David.

         “Not that we know of. You see, in addition to being a brilliant scientist and thinker, Dee was also a little, no, very eccentric. He thought by practicing alchemy he could somehow communicate with the angels. I doubt he got very far with that proposition, but his work was very, very well known in Europe. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the ‘philosopher’s stone.’  That was a much sought-after hypothetical metal that was said to be the key to turn all base metals into gold.”

         Prof. Mundt looked back at the photo and said, “Yes, it would make sense in Vermeer’s time that if this painting is the third in a series, he was aligning the three sciences of his time thought to be the most critical to understanding the entire universe—Astronomy, Geography and Alchemy. Astronomy symbolizes the ether, which is the universe, Geography the Earth and water, and Alchemy symbolizes fire. That’s three of the four classical elements.”

         “What’s the fourth?” asked David, thinking of the Chicago rock band Earth, Wind & Fire.

         “Air or wind. Perhaps there was supposed to be a fourth painting, of another scientist, possibly a meteorologist.  You know, Galileo, Kepler and Pascal were all working on heat and cold and atmospheric pressures in the 17th century.”

         Katie was shaking her head and said, “That is so fascinating. To think Vermeer might have intended to do four paintings about the four classic elements at a time when modern science was just really beginning.”

         David chimed in, asking, “So, then, it makes sense that this new Vermeer is from that series and is probably authentic?”

         Prof. Mundt merely turned to Prof. Horner, who reiterated, “Without the actual painting to look at, I can’t say anything meaningful about the authenticity.  But I must say I’m very intrigued.”

         “I imagine hiring an artist like Vermeer to make four paintings would have been very expensive?” asked David.

         Prof. Horner shook her head and said, “Not necessarily. You see, before the 17th century most artists had to depend on the aristocracy and the papacy for their commissions, but that started to change in northern Europe—and especially in the Netherlands—with the growth of a wealthy merchant class.”

         “Indeed,” said Prof. Mundt, “the Dutch became the masters at forming syndicates to share expenses for building ships or canals, or hiring a famous painter.”

         “That’s right,” said Katie, “I remember that Rembrandt’s famous painting The Night Watch (right)—it’s huge and has dozens of figures in it—was commissioned by a local militia in Amsterdam.”

         “Exactly,” said Prof. Horner, who was looking at the photo through a magnifying glass, “and that picture was painted just a few years before Vermeer painted his scientists. But these were much smaller canvases than The Night Watch, and Vermeer was not considered to be in Rembrandt’s league. So whoever commissioned them probably didn’t pay a fortune for them.”

         She looked closer, then focused in on what seemed to be some writing on the desk next to the globe, just as there was writing in the other two paintings.  In The Astronomer “Meer MDCLXVIII”—“[Ver]meer 1668”— was written on the wall and what looked like “cer” on the cabinet;  in The Geographer “I. Ver-meer MDCLXVIII”—“[Jan] Vermeer 1668”—was written on the cabinet.  Prof. Horner said, “I can barely make it out in this photo, but it seems to read ‘Sui Ien. MDCLXVIII.’”

         “What does that mean?” asked David.

         Prof. Mundt was smiling. “I believe it means ‘sui generis,’ which is Latin for something in a class of its own, something unique.  As gold made from another metal through alchemy would be.”

         “And why is generis spelled ‘Ien’ rather than ‘Gen,’” asked David, who was not grasping everything the scholars were saying.

         “Back then the Roman letter ‘I’ was used for a ‘J’, just as Vermeer spelled his own first name ‘Jan’ with an ‘I’ in The Geographer painting,” said Prof. Horner, pointing to the signature.

         “But generis is spelled with a ‘g’” said Katie.

         Prof. Mundt rubbed his chin and said, “Perhaps Vermeer did not know much Latin. You see, he even spelled his own named differently twice.”

         By now everyone around the table was smiling.  Except Helen Liu.