Albariño & Mussels

Taste of the Sea

Pazo de Señoráns, a winery in Spain's coastal Galicia region, is an Albariño standard-bearer. Its owner, Marisol Bueno, loves pairing her wine with "sailor-style" mussels in a fast, fresh sauce. They appear here in a sailor-style setting: a wavy bowl by Nambé on an Ercole charger that seems to be made of sea glass.

Winery

PAZO DE SEÑORÁNS
There is a Brigadoon-like quality to Pazo de Señoráns, a hidden, hillside winery in a drab, semi-industrial part of Rías Baixas—Spain's Albariño grape heartland, in Galicia. Find the narrow (unmarked) side road, and Marisol Bueno's 17th-century stone building appears—then, once inside the walls, the vineyard itself: trellised overhead, arbor-style, to shed the rain in this cool, wet, coastal corner of the country. Pazo de Señoráns was in the forefront of reviving Albariño, the once forgotten grape with a crisp, citrus-and-melon flavor. Its lively 2003 Albariño ($20) has both a light touch and an impressive intensity of flavor. It's a natural match with Bueno's "sailor-style" mussels, she says, because there is in both the tang of the sea.

—Richard Nalley

Published September 2004