Like thousands of restaurant owners in Spain, Carlos and Ignacio Echapresto have suffered the impact of the pandemic at their restaurant Venta Moncalvillo. However, instead of resigning themselves and waiting for things to return to normal at their Michelin-starred restaurant, they have made the most of the situation to develop pending ideas and launch new ones, always with their village, Daroca de Rioja ( population 47), at the forefront.
The brothers have just refurbished the events room at Venta Moncalvillo to convert it into Cocina de Madre, serving home-made style food sourced from their garden and the surrounding area; they are building a space for gastro-cultural exchanges; and they are extremely excited about their meads, a fermented drink made from honey and water that at Venta Moncalvillo —whose wine cellar, with some 1,300 selections, is undoubtedly one of the most interesting in northern Spain— ranks in the same category as wine.
Few things pair better with a good T-bone steak than a structured red, but as Carlos Echapresto, winner of the National Gastronomy Award for Best Sommelier in Spain in 2016, explains, "mead matches dishes that wine cannot: spicy foods, raw ingredients, vegetables, pickles, citrus-based dishes... the culinary possibilities of this drink have yet to be discovered". Carlos, together with his brother Ignacio in the kitchen, have taken on the challenge of creating dishes to be enjoyed with this refined version of an ancient drink that was once sipped by civilisations all over the world, from Greece to Egypt and China, and even the Mayans.
The meads made in Daroca de Rioja have little to do with the sweet drinks served in medieval fairs or at Game of Thrones banquets. They are sweet, but also semi-dry and dry. In fact, some of the five vintage meads served at Venta Moncalvillo —in fine wine glasses— remind of biological or oxidative ageing wines from southern Spain and dry whites made from aromatic grape varieties. All are around 12-13% alcohol and 3-3.5 pH, are aged in French and American oak barrels and sold in 375ml bottles, just like Manzanilla. Although these fine all have some residual sugar in them, Tyrion Lannister would never identify them as his favourite drink.
Moncalvillo Meadery, as the project is called, is based on three pillars —beekeeping, winemaking and gastronomy— and four people: Carlos and Ignacio Echapresto, Sergio Sáenz, beekeeper, agricultural engineer and winemaker with more than 25 years' experience in wine, and Ismael Echapresto, Carlos' son, who at the age of 23 has already made some wine for the restaurant and is in charge, together with Sergio, of looking after the bees and running the small, cosy winery they have built in Daroca.
It all started one day when Sergio, who started making meads in 2014, visited Venta Moncalvillo to hear Carlos' opinion as a sommelier about the quality of his meads. "It was a real eye-opener for me," admits Carlos, whose grandparents used to keep beehives in Daroca and who himself lives in a house built on the site of an old apiary. "I had tasted meads at the medieval fair in Calahorra, but what Sergio offered me had nothing to do with that. I have always dreamed of making wine, but in Rioja that means having 600 producers complaining at your doorstep, so making mead makes that dream come true.”
Confident of the culinary potential of a drink whose primary ingredient has always been firmly rooted in this part of Rioja, they decided to adopt a winemaking model and became beekeepers. To do so, they set up beehives on various plots in Quel (Rioja Oriental), where almond trees colour the landscape with their white flowers from February onwards and rosemary and thyme perfume the paths and ravines, and in the Moncalvillo mountains, where heather, oak and heath (pictured below) grow, and from whose viewpoint at 1,230 metres you can see a vast expanse of Rioja and even the Pyrenees on a clear day. In such contrasting landscapes, the colour and flavour of the honeys produced by the bees of Moncalvillo Meadery are also different: lighter and more aromatic in Quel and darker and tannic in Moncalvillo, features which are transferred to the flavour and texture of the mead.
In these areas, which they refer to as Baja Montaña (Lower Mountain) and Alta Montaña (Higher Mountain) respectively and which are about 70 kilometres apart, Sergio and Ismael practice "precision beekeeping" with small hives that they visit weekly to ensure that their workers —between 40,000 and 60,000 bees per hive— have their homes and surroundings in tip-top condition. "We look for terroir, areas at elevations between 600 and 1,300 metres with rich vegetation and good flowering that are accessible for us to pick the honey from the honeycombs," Sergio explains. "There are cheap honeys made from rapeseed and sunflowers or others such as polyfloral honey which lack the aromatic complexity of the ones produced here.”
The Moncalvillo Meadery bees live in five colonies. Sergio and Ismael move them between them a couple of times a year. In February the flowering starts in the Lower Mountains and the bees are busy breeding in order to have strong hives. In May, once the clear honeys of Quel have been harvested, Sergio and Carlos move their hives to the Daroca mountains, where the climate is cooler. There, a short distance from the restaurant, the bees collect the dark nectar until the end of summer, before returning in October to the milder climate of the Yerga mountains in Rioja Oriental. "We move the bees at six in the morning, before they leave the hive, and in a couple of hours the transfer is done," says Sergio. "Sometimes, during cold winters, we even put blankets over the hives and leave them there until the almond blossom starts.”
Broadly speaking, mead making is not so different from winemaking. Once the honeys have been extracted, centrifuged and left to settle, they are mixed with local water in small stainless steel tanks. The must is cold fermented based on its origin with yeasts that are bought in for now, but the idea is that in the near future they will come from the field. From the "honey-making" room, the must goes down one floor to the underground ageing cellar, where it rests for eight to 18 months, depending on the type of mead. The entire process, from harvesting the honey to bottling and labelling, is done by hand and is designed for a maximum of 50,000 bottles.
They have 5,000 bottles of the 2019 vintage and plan to increase this to 12,000 for the 2021 vintage, when they hope to also have a presence in similar fine dining restaurants across Spain where, according to Carlos, "sommeliers will be ambassadors for the mead". The price has yet to be set, but production costs suggest that it will be high. "It is an artisan drink with considerable ageing potential," Sergio explains. "I have tasted 15-year-old meads from Poland, where this product has a long tradition, and the result is excellent.”
The complexity of Moncalvillo Meadery meads, says Carlos, has little or nothing to do with other lighter styles, intended for more casual drinking moments, which tend to be carbonated, low in alcohol and cheap. "To make mead with 4% alcohol, you need a small amount of honey; to make one with 12%, you need a lot," he says. "In ancient times, mead lost out to wine because wine was much cheaper to produce.”
So far they have produced five meads that Venta Moncalvillo alternates with wines in their tasting menu. Number 1, made with rosemary and thyme from Quel and aged for eight months in French oak barrels, is served at the same temperature as a white wine. It is a light, floral style and Carlos pairs it with starters such as caramelised onion ice cream or beetroot, chive mayonnaise and caviar, -it works well with both, enhancing the dishes. It is perhaps less convincing with the boletus broth, but it pairs nicely with the more bitter notes of the celeriac, watercress and rocket salad.
Number 2 is also from Quel, a slightly sweeter style with rosemary and thyme aromas, which goes well with appetizers but also with candied desserts. Number 3, made from heather and heath from Sierra de Moncalvillo and aged in barrels for 12 months, will likely be the favourite of wine lovers. Its colour doesn't differ much from that of an amontillado or oloroso, and in fact it is reminiscent of young oxidative styles made from the Pedro Ximénez grape variety. Its 13% alcohol is well integrated and is a great match for the artichoke dish with Idiazabal and Cameros cheese, olives, herbs and parmentier potatoes that Ignacio has created for this wine.
With 60 g of residual sugar, number 4, also made from heather and heath from the Moncalvilo mountains, goes well with blue cheeses and spicy foods. The 5, which blends honeys from both areas and is macerated with walnuts from Daroca, is perfect as a hedonistic digestive or to finish off a meal with a puff pastry dessert or cured cheese with walnuts. According to Carlos, it also has great ageing potential.
Slowly but surely, Carlos and the rest of the team are brainstorming new styles and fermentations to match all kinds of cuisines and dishes, whether born in the vegetable garden of Daroca or cooked in fine restaurants from Tokyo to Toronto. Who knows if one day Rioja mead will take the landscapes of the mountains of Yerga and Moncalvillo as far as wine has done.
