Mar de Frades with Sashimi
Mar de Frades
Winery Mar de Frades
www.mardefrades.es/
D.O.: Rías Baixas
Grapes: 100% Albariño
Ageing: No
Price: 14 €
Excerpt from the book “Pairings of spanish wines with exotic cuisines”.
Click to see the preparation of these dishes, in Asian recipes.
This winery offers guided visits with wine tasting, and I strongly advise everyone to seize the opportunity and visit Monte Valiñas, where, apart from admiring a beautiful avant-garde winery, you will enjoy the exciting spectacle of the Mar de Frades at your feet, where the first Albariño plants are said to have been landed.
Seeing where it comes from, we will understand this wine in a minute. Places like O Grove and Cambados are a stone’s throw away, so you may also give yourself a little treat.
This Albariño is no doubt one of the great ones, a serious wine, with no filigree, which fully respects the profile of varietal wine, with those aromas of green apple and white flowers, and that salty, Atlantic hint that can only be understood when contemplating the Arousa estuary from the trained viewpoint of the new winery.
Assorted sashimi
This dish has already become fashionable all around the world because Japanese cuisine has succeeded on all five continents, but not everybody knows that sashimi is a luxury dish which is only consumed in restaurants above a certain level, never at a domestic level, since a sashimi cutter is almost an artist, a surgeon who masters the art of knives and the anatomy of all fish.
Cooking assorted sashimi at home is difficult, not only from a technical point of view, but also because at least six diners must be gathered, otherwise the dish will be miserable.
Personally speaking, I usually cook it at home because in Asturias we have some almost alive fish that are outstanding when uncooked, but I only use one at a time, according to the season: tuna, salmon, mackerel, bream…
Pairing
We have already stated that both this Albariño wine and sashimi are high-level products, and seeing a Japanese table with a multicolour assorted sashimi on it and the blue bottle of Mar de Frades in the middle is a spectacle that justifies itself.
When pairing a sashimi, apart from all the individual flavours of the fish you must take into account the soya sauce and the wasabi. Some wines may go well with the fish but they collapse when confronted to the stream of flavours from the condiment.
That is one of the virtues of this wine: it can withstand anything, due to its great acidity structure, which can endure important challenges, up to rabidly spiced meals, but it is mainly respectful with such delicate products as raw fish and does not interfere with its tasting.