Share This Gerry Dawes's Spain Post


Instagram

In 2019, again ranked in the Top 50 Gastronomy Blogs and Websites for Gastronomists & Gastronomes in 2019 by Feedspot. "The Best Gastronomy blogs selected from thousands of Food blogs, Culture blogs and Food Science. We’ve carefully selected these websites because they are actively working to educate, inspire, and empower their readers with . . . high-quality information. (Last Updated Oct 23, 2019)

Over 1,150,000 views since inception, 16,000+ views in January 2020.



36. Gerry Dawes's Spain: An Insider's Guide to Spanish Food, Wine, Culture and Travel gerrydawesspain.com

"My good friend Gerry Dawes, the unbridled Spanish food and wine enthusiast cum expert whose writing, photography, and countless crisscrossings of the peninsula have done the most to introduce Americans—and especially American food professionals—to my country's culinary life. . .” - - Chef-restaurateur-humanitarian José Andrés, Nobel Peace Prize Nominee and Oscar Presenter 2019; Chef-partner of Mercado Little Spain at Hudson Yards, New York 2019

7/13/2022

Noel Chandler, The Champagne Count of Pamplona's San Fermín


* * * * *
“It was amazing champagne.” 
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises


Hemingway was a great lover of Champagne and he often referred to it in his writing.  In The Sun Also Rises, three of Hemingway’s characters - - the free-spending, Champagne-loving Count Mippipopolous, the protagonist Jake Barnes, and the unforgettable femme fatale Lady Brett - - polish off three bottles of Mumms in a single session.  
  
The Champagne drinking scene took place in the opening chapters just before Jake Barnes, Lady Brett, Robert Cohn, Mike Campbell, and Bill Gorton - - fictional charter members of Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation” - -  headed down to Pamplona, Spain for the Fiestas de San Fermín, sans Count Mippipopolous.   At the beginning of Fiesta, Hemingway’s characters, now minus the Count’s generous Champagne contributions, switched to cheap red wine in the peasant bars of the old quarter of Pamplona. 

The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, became a classic and spawned a cult-like devotion to San Fermín, especially among English-speaking foreigners.  It would be several decades before the modern-day incarnation of the Count surfaced at San Fermín in the person of a generous Welshman named Noel Chandler.  Chandler, like Count Mippipopolous, has drunk his share of Champagne in Paris (where he celebrates New Year’s Eve).  

Although he neither holds, nor claims a title, with his rugged countenance, polished manners, and mysterious air, Chandler is clearly a worthy spiritual descendant of Hemingway’s Champagne-loving Count and his annual San Fermín Champagne party, until a few years ago when it was decided that the well-aged timbers of Chandler’s lofty walk-up apartment above the calle Estafeta could not safely support the many scores of people who were ascending each 6th of July to party with Noel.

 
Noel Chandler. Photo by Gerry Dawes.

Over the years, Chandler’s annual party had become one of the hottest invitations in Pamplona.  One of the great bullfight aficionados of all time, a first-rate Hispanophile, and a veteran of more than forty sanfermines and countless encierros (the running of the bulls), which pass through the famous Estafeta below the scene of the Champagne parties, Noel Chandler had indeed become Pamplona’s Conde de Champagne.

At 10:00 a.m. on the sixth of July every year for nearly fifteen years, in his apartment, you could find Chandler carefully unpacking and chilling 5-6 cases of Perrier-Jouët, Veuve Clicquot, Gossett, or Moët & Chandon Champagne.  Soon the first of nearly 200 San Fermín devotees from all over the world would begin arriving at Chandler’s place to help pop the corks and celebrate the beginning of yet another Fiesta. 

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway described opening day of the Fiestas de San Fermín at Pamplona as well as anyone,  "At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the Fiesta exploded.  There is no other way to describe it."

On calle Estafeta, a legendary street where many a bullrunner, including Noel Chandler,  has made his reputation, hundreds of  people gather on their way to Pamplona's storybook city hall to await the firing by the city's politicos of the cohete, or rocket, which signals the beginning of this wild event.  During the course of the raucous eight-and-a-half day fiesta, the brave, the loco, and the inebriated (often one and the same), young and not-so-young men (and sometimes women) allow themselves to be chased by bulls through the streets of the old town for what Don Ernesto, as Hemingway is known here, called "a morning's pleasure."  But before they do, they need that first day, July 6th, to gear up for fiesta and recharge their courage batteries for the next morning’s running of the bulls by drinking everything in sight--beer, wine, hard stuff, and lots of bulk-produced sparkling wine, admittedly a poor substitute for real Champagne.

In recent years, this non-method champenoise bubbly has been the wine of choice on opening day and the San Fermín celebrants pour it on, in, and around one another in astonishing quantities. Within a few minutes after the cohete explodes above the city, the Estafeta will be a river of white-and-red clad party animals bouncing up the street to the infectious folk music of Navarra, drinking and spraying mega-hectolitres of cheap fizzy wine as they go.

Beginning about 11:00 a.m., Noel Chandler’s guests used to climb the stairs of an unprepossessing building to his large, rambling apartment on the fifth floor. Here there will be no cheap sparklers.  At Chandler’s place, real French Champagne is served and it will be poured into, not on, the guests.  The invited (and, often self-invited)--screenwriters, artists, photographers, stockbrokers, lawyers, professors, Basque bullrunners, the occasional bullfighter, etc.--arrived from points scattered across the globe: Australia, England, France, Sweden, Israel, California, New York, Florida, and all around Spain. Many would have not seen each other since sanfermines past, so there were big abrazos all around and much catching up on the past year’s happenings.

At a typical Chandler Champagne party, it common to see many of the following people:  Noel Chandler’s long time companion, Nancy Fortier of Atlanta; Jim Hollander, a crack wire photographer based in Tel Aviv; Davey Crockett, a descendant of the famous American frontiersman, a veteran at San Fermín, and survivor of many encierros (bull runs); writer Jesse Graham, a relative of the great Gerald Brenan; the fine New York artist Warren Parker; and British bullfight guru Michael Wigram, all of whom would salute each other with a clink of Champagne flutes.  The late Charles Patrick Scanlan, a long-time resident of Spain and one of the most knowledgeable aficionados would be in a corner, drinking Guinness, working out the disposition of season bullfight tickets with Rex Howieson, the group’s semi-official social director.
  


Jesse Graham. Photo by Gerry Dawes.

Joseph Distler, then a New York restaurateur and bar owner, who now lives in Paris and has run on the horns of the fighting bulls in every Pamplona encierro for the more than forty years and has appeared on such highly rated American television programs as 20/20 and 48 Hours stopped at the top of the stairs, then turned in the middle of greeting Noel Chandler and a circle of guests to introduce himself to a stunning Spanish woman with dazzling eyes.

“¡Holahhh! Soy José,” Distler purred in his Brooklyn-accented Spanish. 
“Hi. I’m Carmen,” the woman replied in English, “Have you met my husband?”


Joe Distler in the 1970s.  Photo by Gerry Dawes.

Guests would make their way down the long hall past some exceptional taurine photographs, pictures from Fiestas past, and the Matt Carney Memorial Suite, the room where the great bullrunner and honorary son of Pamplona used to stay, complete with Carney’s old bullrunning costume and other mementos.  In Chandler’s living room, Champagne glasses were lined up on a cupboard and a television set was strategically placed so guests can watch the firing of the cohete.  The whole apartment scene was like a New Year’s Eve party, except it was held in July in the  middle of the day.

As noon approached, Chandler’s guests would have filled the living room to top up their Champagne glasses in anticipation of the firing of the cohete.  It was Chandler’s custom to stand by the television set and as the rocket was lit and shwooshed skyward and lift his glass.  The report from the cohete could be heard both from the television and from the sky above Pamplona.  Chandler would shout, “¡Viva San Fermín!” and be answered with a chorus of “¡Viva!” from his guests.  Red neckerchiefs with the image of San Fermín and emblems of various drinking and social clubs (Anaitasuna, Peña Sueca, etc.), which are dedicated to the veneration of the saint and his fiesta, were then pulled out and tied on. (The proper San Fermín etiquette is not to put on one’s scarf until the cohete signals the official beginning of fiesta.)

The Champagne flowed freely as more hearty “¡Viva San Fermín!” toasts accompanied by  big abrazos worked their way around the room.  Guests took turns standing on either of the two small balconies overlooking calle Estafeta, where the crowd who watched the firing of the cohete from the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, begins to pour into the surrounding streets, singing, dancing, and drinking as they go.  The crowd surge effect is like popping the cork on a bottle of Champagne.  
 
All day on July 6th, more people would drift in and out of Noel Chandler’s apartment, stopping to saludar the host, sip a glass of Champagne and catch up with old friends who are attending this year’s fiesta.  In small groups, they recounted stories from their communal oral history, whose retelling over the years has ripened it into vintage nostalgia which is indelibly engraved into memories of this very close circle of friends.  For Chandler’s of friends, Hemingway’s Sun still rises each year on San Fermín. 

Over a glass of Gosset Grand Reserve in Pamplona during San Fermín this year, Chandler described how his Champagne party had evolved.  “For thirteen years through 1983, we had a fantastic Champagne breakfast at the Tres Reyes hotel.  Then in 1984, after I had purchased the apartment, I decided to have my own opening day Champagne party.  It started out fairly small. We only had about 15 people - - myself, my old Australian friend Rex Howieson, the late legendary Irish-American bullrunner Matt Carney, Joe Distler, and a few other San Fermín regulars and their ladies. 


The first year I served Veuve Clicquot Gold Label Brut.  It was a bit difficult to get Veuve Clicquot in Spain at the time, but I was still working as an executive for an international computer firm, so I was traveling a lot.  Each time I passed through an international airport I stopped at the duty-free shop and bought a couple of bottles of “the widow.”  By the time the next San Fermín came around, I would have 20-30 bottles for the party.  Sometimes I would buy another case of Champagne just for insurance.  The party grew.  I was able to procure enough Moët et Chandon by then, so I served it for four or five years.  Recently I found a local shop which could supply me with enough Taittinger, so now I poured that fine Champagne one year.” 

I figure we had about 200 people the last year during the course of the day.  We drank 60  bottles of Champagne before it was over, plus another case or two of my good red wines.     “That’s quite a lot of wine,” Chandler told me in the mid-1990s.  “The party may be getting too big and I am going to have to think about it.”   

But having to think about it could wait.  Chandler still had eight more days of Fiesta to go.  And that included a Gosset Champagne supper at Pamplona’s superb San Ignacio restaurant in honor of the matador (and Chandler’s long-time favorite) Francisco Rivera Ordoñez.   Rivera Ordoñez, grandson of the great Antonio Ordoñez, is a disciplined young torero, who is seldom seen drinking anything alcoholic during the season, but not even he passed up a glass of Gosset Champagne Gran Reserve.  Chandler and the other guests agreed it was “amazing” Champagne.

Later in the week, Chandler was feted by Revue du Champagne magazine’s Tom Källene at a street breakfast.  These traditional breakfasts are one of the most endearing customs of San Fermín.  Trestle tables are lined up outside bar-restaurants in the cobblestoned streets of the old quarter for group breakfasts featuring eggs, ham, and fried potatoes accompanied by plenty of wine, singing, and laughter.  The breakfasts are often interrupted as delivery trucks try to squeeze by within inches of the guests, who in turn become good-natured traffic directors, while others applaud the progress of the truck as it crawls by the gathering. 

At the time I doubted that Chandler’s “having to think about it” would put an end to Noel Chandler’s  traditional Champagne party at San Fermín.  For a few years after I interviewed him, at noon on the sixth of July each year, the Fiesta still exploded, the corks will still popped, and “amazing” Champagne still flowed at the Conde de Champagne’s apartment high above the calle Estafeta in Pamplona, Spain.

You could count on it, that is, a few years ago when the reality that they all might soon be celebrating the fiesta at street level after Chandler learned that there was a very real possibility that the ancient floor of his vintage apartment might no longer support a couple of hundred revelers full of Champagne.   That year, he ostensibly called a halt to The Champagne Count of San Fermín's remarkable, effervescent fiesta.

Note: On October 14, my old friend Noel Chandler, passed from our midst and went on to his Estefeta piso en the sky. He was truly one of a kind, a legend who was a dear friend of mine for some forty years.
- - The End - -


Each of Gerry Dawes’s three daughters, Erica, Elena, and Maria had drops of Pol Roger Champagne placed on their lips within minutes of their births.

 

* * * * * 

 
 
(Available at Amazon, Despana (NYC), LaTienda.com, La Boca Restaurant (Santa Fe, NM) and at Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore (NYC). 
 
Comments are welcome and encouraged.
 
Help Support Gerry Dawes's Spain & Its Content

If you enjoy these blog posts, please consider a contribution to help me continue the work of gathering all this great information and these photographs for Gerry Dawes's Insider's Guide to Spanish Food, Wine, Culture and Travel. Contributions of $5 and up will be greatly appreciated. Contributions of $100 or more will be acknowledged on the blog.

Please click on this secure link to Paypal to make your contribution.
 

* * * * *
  Shall deeds of Caesar or Napoleon ring
More true than Don Quixote's vapouring?
Hath winged Pegasus more nobly trod
Than Rocinante stumbling up to God?
 
Poem by Archer M. Huntington inscribed under the Don Quixote on his horse Rocinante bas-relief sculpture by his wife, Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington,
in the courtyard of the Hispanic Society of America’s incredible museum at 613 W. 155th Street, New York City.
 ______________________________________________________________________________________
 Gastronomy Blogs

In 2019, again ranked in the Top 50 Gastronomy Blogs and Websites for Gastronomists & Gastronomes in 2019 by Feedspot. (Last Updated Oct 23, 2019) 

"The Best Gastronomy blogs selected from thousands of Food blogs, Culture blogs and Food Science blogs in our index using search and social metrics. We’ve carefully selected these websites because they are actively working to educate, inspire, and empower their readers with frequent updates and high-quality information."  

36. Gerry Dawes's Spain: An Insider's Guide to Spanish Food, Wine, Culture and Travel


 
About Gerry Dawes

My good friend Gerry Dawes, the unbridled Spanish food and wine enthusiast cum expert whose writing, photography, and countless crisscrossings of the peninsula have done the most to introduce Americans—and especially American food professionals—to my country's culinary life." -- Chef-restaurateur-humanitarian José Andrés, Nobel Peace Prize Nominee and Oscar Presenter 2019


Gerry Dawes is the Producer and Program Host of Gerry Dawes & Friends, a weekly radio progam on Pawling Public Radio in Pawling, New York (streaming live and archived at www.pawlingpublicradio.org and at www.beatofthevalley.com.)

Dawes was awarded Spain's prestigious Premio Nacional de Gastronomía (National Gastronomy Award) in 2003. He writes and speaks frequently on Spanish wine and gastronomy and leads gastronomy, wine and cultural tours to Spain. He was a finalist for the 2001 James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award for Best Magazine Writing on Wine, won The Cava Institute's First Prize for Journalism for his article on cava in 2004, was awarded the CineGourLand “Cinéfilos y Gourmets” (Cinephiles & Gourmets) prize in 2009 in Getxo (Vizcaya) and received the 2009 Association of Food Journalists Second Prize for Best Food Feature in a Magazine for his Food Arts article, a retrospective piece about Catalan star chef, Ferran Adrià. 


". . .That we were the first to introduce American readers to Ferran Adrià in 1997 and have ever since continued to bring you a blow-by-blow narrative of Spain's riveting ferment is chiefly due to our Spanish correspondent, Gerry "Mr. Spain" Dawes, the messianic wine and food journalist raised in Southern Illinois and possessor of a self-accumulated doctorate in the Spanish table. Gerry once again brings us up to the very minute. . ." - - Michael & Ariane Batterberry, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher and Founding Editor/Publisher, Food Arts, October 2009. 
 
Pilot for a reality television series on wine, gastronomy, culture and travel in Spain.
 

7/11/2022

A Homage to Patxaran (Pacharán): The Pretty Ruby-colored Macho Drink of Northern Spain



* * * * *



Patxaran (from the Basque paitar (liquor) and aran ("sloe"), called pacharán in Castilian Spanish, the red sloeberry anís made by macerating arándanos, or endrinas, (sloeberries) from the blackthorn shrub in fine anisette spirits for several months (one part fresh sloeberries to three parts anisette).   Patxaran Navarro is controlled by an official denominación de origen, or D. O., like wine, and must contain no artificial flavorings or additives.  Sometimes a few coffee beans or cinnamon sticks are added to the patxaran casero housemade styles.   The maceration period can run from one to eight months.  Some homemade patxaran leave the berries in the anís.

7/01/2022

Hemingway's Burguete & Mythical Feasts in the Mists of the Historical Pass of Roncesvalles in Navarra: Scenes from Sunset in a Glass: Adventures of a Food and Wine Road Warrior in Spain Volume I Enhanced Photography Edition by Gerry Dawes



* * * * *

Text & Photographs by Gerry Dawes©2020

   
Hostal Burguete, Burguete-Auritz (Navarra).


  
Roncesvalles.

My late former wife Diana Valenti Dawes and I spent many wonderful sanfermines, the annual fiestas at Pamplona with Alicia Hall, a spinster school teacher from Milledgeville, Georgia, who was a woman of great charm and character.  Some years we started before the Fiestas de San Fermín by driving up to Burguete in the Pyrenees mountains northeast of Pamplona for a few days. 


Alice "Alicia" Hall.

We stayed at the rustic Hostal Burguete, where Hemingway got the inspiration for the hotel  in The Sun Also Rises, where Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton stayed during their trout fishing expedition on the Irati River, which rushes down these green Navarrese-Basque mountains and offered great trout fishing. 


 Trout fishing in the Pyrenees of Navarra.

The hotel, with its heavy, dark wooden beams, big beds with warm covers, and plumbing from a by-gone era had changed little since Hemingway stayed there.  Diana, Alicia, and I loved to spend a couple of quiet relaxing days there - - reading, walking out on the road to Roncesvalles to pick wild strawberries to put on our ice cream, and having long discussions about Spain over dinner and plenty of Navarra’s country vino tinto.  

Floren and 1-year old Erica Dawes, Hostal Burguete, July 1977.

Floren, the prematurely middle-aged, but handsome daughter of the innkeeper, her mother, who often sat in the kitchen while Florián, on a big wood-fired, cast-iron cook stove prepared reasonably good Navarrese food (at these prices, a bargain): Stews of alubias (white beans) with chorizo, magras con tomate (pork slices in tomato sauce), pollo asado con patatas fritas (chicken with fried potatoes), trucha a la navarra (fried trout with a slice of ham tucked in its belly), and vainas (fresh green beans with boiled potatoes).   

 Kitchen, Hostal Burguete, Burguete (Navarra), July 1977.
 
 
 Pochas-alubias and Las Campanas Navarra Rosado.

After finishing a bottle or two of Navarra clarete (light young red wine) or rosado and, perhaps, a coffee, a Spanish brandy or Patxarán (sloe berry-infused anís) as we talked, we turned in early.  Diana and I would snuggle into the big wooden poster bed in a room that overlooked a green meadow behind the house, read a bit from The Sun Also Rises and other books on Spain and sleep next to one another soundly until morning.  Sometimes a rainstorm would come through at night, freshening the air and making it far cooler than the July calendar seemed to call for. 

The Sun Also Rises piano, Hostal Burguete, July 1977.  Photo by Gerry Dawes.


 Piano photo of the Hemingway "signature" from the internet.

In a side room, Floren showed us the upright piano that was supposedly the one that the Bill Gorton character played in The Sun Also Rises.  The piano was believable, but "E. Hemingway 25-7-1923" crudely scratched on the underside of the top of the piano was not so believable, especially since Hemingway, although he went to sanfermines in Pamplona in 1923, did not go to Burguete until 1924.  

 In the early 1970s, Diana Valenti Dawes during San Fermín dancing the riau-riau on the shoulders of Big Steve Lee, the "Gentle Giant," a very large friend of ours, in front of the Ayuntamiento, Pamplona.

On the morning of July 6, Alicia, Diana and I would pack up and head down the mountain roads to Pamplona, where, as Ernest Hemingway wrote about the beginning of the fiesta:  At noon of Sunday, the 6 of July, the fiesta exploded. There is no other way to describe it.”  Our tranquil days and nights in Burguete led to our surrendering to the wild, raucous days and nights of the nine-day, non-stop Fiestas de San Fermín that were to come. 

Always, during those years, about halfway through the fiesta, about the time everyone needed a break from the noise and jaleo of San Fermín, we formed a caravan of cars and headed back up into these same hills to the pass of Roncesvalles, just north of Burguete, where we had picnics that became legendary.  A couple of kilometers above the monastery of Ronscesvalles, along the road to France, I knew a splendid Brigadoon-like glade with an icy little stream that only the initiated can find. My friend John Fulton, the American Matador-and-artist, who had gone there with James Michener, who described it his Iberia:  Spanish Travels and Reflections,  and had introduced me to it during my first time at the Fiestas de San Fermín in 1970.  

 Matador John Fulton and Gerry Dawes in the plaza de toros de Pamplona 1970s.
Photo by the great Jim Hollander. 

   James Michener, Gerry Dawes and Diana Valenti Dawes at Michener's home in Austin, Texas.

In Iberia, Michener wrote about this very glade:  "I had spotted it on my pilgrimage to Santiago.  We were eight as we left Pamplona after the morning running of the bulls:  Patter (Ashcraft) and her husband; Bob Daley, long-time European sportswriter for The New York Times and his French wife, both with a sense of what makes a good picnic; Vavra ((Robert Vavra, photographer of Iberia) and Fulton; the Hemingway double (Kenneth Vanderford) and I.   We were headed north, toward the pass of Roncesvalles, that historic and mystery-laden route through the Pyrenees which Charlemagne had used in 778 for his retreat throught the mists and where he had failed to hear the battle horn of his dying Roland. . .and there in a glade so quiet, so softly green that it seemed as if defeated knights might have slept in it the evening before, we spread our blankets and prepared the meal."
    
With an odd collection of companions, each year we made the pilgrimage to this historic little valley in the pass that is haunted by the ghost of brave Roland and by the spirits of generations of pilgrims who passed this way over the centuries walking the Chemin de Saint Jacques, the great Camino de Santiago, a trek across northern Spain that from this point at Roncesvalles to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, where Saint James’s bones are said to reside, is over 600 miles. 


Sometime around July 10, Diana and I would round up a crazy band of picnickers that included the thin, but sassy, seventy-something Alicia Hall, the doyenne of foreign bullfight aficionados; Kenneth Vanderford, Ernest Hemingway's "double," a curmudgeonly university professor with long-billed ball cap, a white beard, and portly girth; and Lindsay Daen, an internationally known New Zealand sculptor.  The goateed Daen lived in Puerto Rico and Madrid, wore bush jackets and a strange looking glass device around his neck, drove a red Kharmann Ghia and showed up each year at the Bar Txoko in Pamplona with a new lady (or ladies), usually a young, impressionable art student.  

(Photo: Gerry Dawes at San Fermín 1971.)

Invariably Lindsay met these young women on his scouting forays into the Prado Museum in Madrid and just as invariably, when he showed up with one of them, we would slyly ask him, "Where did you meet Sally or Bev or Ronnie?"  I referred to these women as Lindsay's "recent acquisitions from the Prado."  One year, he arrived with a pretty young lady and claimed that he had met her when he saved her from a piece of cornice stone falling from a building in Madrid.
    
“Shocking that they have allowed the Prado to fall in such dis-repair!” was my comeback. 

In subsequent years, word of our band of Roncesvalles merry merienda makers got around and we were joined by an eclectic crew of adventurers and of the women of several nationalities who came to San Fermín with them each year.  Some of these regulars had been coming without fail for decades to the fiestas.  Many of them could best be described as the spiritual descendants of Ernest Hemingway’s Jake Barnes and other members of the Lost Generation.
    
Arriving at the hard to find spot on the eastern side of the steep road that climbed up to a pilgrim's sanctuary at the top of the pass, we unloaded the luncheon bounty from our cars.  The men helped Alicia down the steep, grassy slope to the green, mossy banks of the stream, where Diana, who had recruited some of the women to collect the food at the Pamplona mercado municipal that morning, laid out our splendid repast: Anchoas, salty anchovies cured in oil; roasted red pimientos; streaky pink slices of jamón;  garlicky red-orange chorizo; white Parmesan-like Roncal from the Pyrenees east of Roncesvalles and smoky Idiazábal ewes’ milk cheeses from a town south of San Sebastián; aceitunas, olives cured with rosemary, thyme and garlic; crusty, country bread; and fruits—blushing ripe peaches, big black picota cherries, and honeydew melons.  I put a dozen bottles of Las Campanas Navarra rosados (the same wines Hemingway carried in his car around Spain with him) and claretes (rosés and lighter red wines) and melons in the cold rushing little rivulet to cool, then dispatched a detail of volunteers for dry firewood to build a little fire.
    
The country food of Navarra is delicious, even more so in the mountain air, the wine flowed freelyand laughter came easily. Every now and then someone would step away from the group and stare out across the splendid green woods and watch the rivulet run down the valley.  They knew that back in the  frantic hustle of modern city life, these hours spent in the Garden  of Eden would ripen with age and retelling. 



  
 Birney Adams and George Semler at one of our meriendas in the magical glade of Roncesvalles, 1971.

Until some newcomers not present during the early years of these outings, decided one year by popular decree that the should move the show down out of the historical mists to an easier-to-get-to spot, thus destroying the magic, our picnic had a formula that didn't vary from the first year until the year we stopped having our picnics,   : Drink some wine, eat wonderful Navarrese food, drink some more wine, get mellow, lay down on the mossy slopes and tell jokes to a well-primed audience until the mystical fog drifts in, as it often does by mid-afternoon. The joke session began that first year, when Hemingway’s double Kenneth Vanderford, a man then in his sixties, who was sitting in a folding chair he carried in his car, began to hold court with the group sitting on the ground around him.  While stroking the arm of a attractive, flaxen-haired young model, who had worked for a Senator from California (and, with whom, I had had a mercifully short liason), Vanderford had drifted quite naturally onto the subject of sex and how, in our society, it was not easily accessible to men of his age.
    
“The only thing available to men like me,” he said, “is loneliness and masturbation.  In this society, sex seems to be forbidden to the very old and very young. ”
    
“That's not the case in all societies” the sculptor Lindsay Daen, himself obviously no stranger to the randy arts, said.  Then he told a tale of how he had once watched a five-year old girl openly masturbate on the veranda of a house in Polynesia, while he and her parents were carrying on a conversation.
    
“Her parents didn’t seem to find anything wrong with what she was doing,” Lindsay said, “and when I thought about it, I didn’t either.”
    
“Well,” I chimed in, “there’s plenty I find wrong with it.”
    
“Like what?” Daen asked.
    
“The kid could go blind, get pimples, and, if she continues masturbating, she will undoubtedly go crazy.  Look what it’s done to you and Vanderford.”
    
Any serious drift the conversation may have had disintegrated with the peals of laughter, then the jokes started.  After a few risque jokes in English got the group warmed up, a Swede had us rolling on the ground in fits by telling a particularly dirty joke in Swedish, which only the three other Swedes at the picnic, including my friend Birney Adam's wife Lotta understood.  No interpretation was necessary.  It didn’t matter, the food, the wine, the camaraderie, and the reverie of the country afternoon made these picnics the stuff of vintage nostalgia. 
 
The most incredible thing that ever happened during the five years we gathered for these picnics, was the near conversion of the Hemingway look-a-like, Kenneth Vanderford, a died-in-the-wool atheist and a friend of Madeleine Murray O’Hair, America’s most vociferous non-believer.


Kenneth Vanderford, "Hemingway's Double," at a picnic in Roncesvalles.
    
One year, early in the proceedings, a mist of metaphysical caliber had drifted into the upper tier of our little hidden valley.  Things were getting spooky and we were worried about Lindsay Daen, who had still not arrived.  We had already had some food and wine, when I coaxed Vanderford, a history professor, into telling us about the legend of Roland blowing his horn to summon his uncle Charlemagne's army as he fought for his life in this pass.  Vanderford ended his tale of the famous Chanson de Roland and remarked that, like lots of other religion-based legends, the popular accounts of the retreat of Roland and his death were mostly nonsense.  At that precise moment, several notes that sounded like a bugle call from Roland himself came from high in the woods.  Vanderford looked heavenward and seemed momentarily shaken by what he must have thought was a call to reckoning.  It was Lindsay blowing his bugle as he tried to locate us.  We never let Kenneth Vanderford live that day down. 

 Lindsay Daen blowing his bugle in Roncesvalles.
    
If it were not for the bullfights, for which most of us had tickets, we would have passed the whole afternoon here, immersed in the camaraderie we shared and in the reverie of this magical place.  Reluctantly, for the fight was to begin at six and Pamplona was at least an hour away, we packed up and wound our way back down the curvy mountain roads to the fiesta with another tale to add to the legends of the pass of Roncesvalles. 

- - The End - -


 

* * * * * 

 
(Available at Amazon, Despana (NYC), LaTienda.com, La Boca Restaurant (Santa Fe, NM) and at Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore (NYC). 
 
Comments are welcome and encouraged.
 
Help Support Gerry Dawes's Spain & Its Content

If you enjoy these blog posts, please consider a contribution to help me continue the work of gathering all this great information and these photographs for Gerry Dawes's Insider's Guide to Spanish Food, Wine, Culture and Travel. Contributions of $5 and up will be greatly appreciated. Contributions of $100 or more will be acknowledged on the blog.

Please click on this secure link to Paypal to make your contribution.
 

* * * * *
  Shall deeds of Caesar or Napoleon ring
More true than Don Quixote's vapouring?
Hath winged Pegasus more nobly trod
Than Rocinante stumbling up to God?
 
Poem by Archer M. Huntington inscribed under the Don Quixote on his horse Rocinante bas-relief sculpture by his wife, Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington,
in the courtyard of the Hispanic Society of America’s incredible museum at 613 W. 155th Street, New York City.
 ______________________________________________________________________________________
 Gastronomy Blogs

Again ranked in the Top 50 Gastronomy Blogs and Websites for Gastronomists & Gastronomes by Feedspot. (Last Updated October, 2019) 

"The Best Gastronomy blogs selected from thousands of Food blogs, Culture blogs and Food Science blogs in our index using search and social metrics. We’ve carefully selected these websites because they are actively working to educate, inspire, and empower their readers with frequent updates and high-quality information."  

36. Gerry Dawes's Spain: An Insider's Guide to Spanish Food, Wine, Culture and Travel


 
About Gerry Dawes

My good friend Gerry Dawes, the unbridled Spanish food and wine enthusiast cum expert whose writing, photography, and countless crisscrossings of the peninsula have done the most to introduce Americans—and especially American food professionals—to my country's culinary life." -- Chef-restaurateur-humanitarian José Andrés, Nobel Peace Prize Nominee and Oscar Presenter 2019


Gerry Dawes is the Producer and Program Host of Gerry Dawes & Friends, a weekly radio progam on Pawling Public Radio in Pawling, New York (streaming live and archived at www.pawlingpublicradio.org and at www.beatofthevalley.com.)

Dawes was awarded Spain's prestigious Premio Nacional de Gastronomía (National Gastronomy Award) in 2003. He writes and speaks frequently on Spanish wine and gastronomy and leads gastronomy, wine and cultural tours to Spain. He was a finalist for the 2001 James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award for Best Magazine Writing on Wine, won The Cava Institute's First Prize for Journalism for his article on cava in 2004, was awarded the CineGourLand “Cinéfilos y Gourmets” (Cinephiles & Gourmets) prize in 2009 in Getxo (Vizcaya) and received the 2009 Association of Food Journalists Second Prize for Best Food Feature in a Magazine for his Food Arts article, a retrospective piece about Catalan star chef, Ferran Adrià. 


". . .That we were the first to introduce American readers to Ferran Adrià in 1997 and have ever since continued to bring you a blow-by-blow narrative of Spain's riveting ferment is chiefly due to our Spanish correspondent, Gerry "Mr. Spain" Dawes, the messianic wine and food journalist raised in Southern Illinois and possessor of a self-accumulated doctorate in the Spanish table. Gerry once again brings us up to the very minute. . ." - - Michael & Ariane Batterberry, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher and Founding Editor/Publisher, Food Arts, October 2009. 
 
Pilot for a reality television series on wine, gastronomy, culture and travel in Spain.
 
Related Posts with Thumbnails