Greeks and Romans thought the world looked like a fried egg. There was land in the middle, wholly surrounded by Ocean, with a sea (appropriately called the Mediterranean) bisecting the land. Even in the early Middle Ages, fishermen in what is now Normandy are said to have heard at dead of night the boats putting off from shore, carrying the souls of the newly dead off to the Isles of the Blest, out to seas colder than the Hebrides, “where the fleet of stars is anchored, and the young star-captains glow.”
One of the wildest views of Ocean is to be had from the headland in northwest Spain called Finisterre (the End of the Earth). It was on the beach here that medieval pilgrims, after visiting the shrine of St. James the Apostle at Santiago de Compostela, would gather palmate shells as souvenirs.
The bones of St. James were not discovered at Compostela until around 813 A.D., and the Apostle was quickly enlisted in the struggle of Christian Spain against the Muslims who had controlled much of the peninsula for more than a century. Legend says that St. James was seen mounted on a white horse doing battle in a manner that earned him the sobriquet “Moor-Slayer.” Christians were not alone in having such heavenly help.
The earliest Muslims, the Companions of the Prophet, saw angels riding beside them at the battle of Badr. You can still meet Muslims—mild men, not wild-eyed enthusiasts who commit atrocities like the recent sad outrage in Madrid—who speak with regret about the way that Spain was lost to the Dar ul-Islam.
These were regrets Christians of the Early Middle Ages found themselves unable to share. I guess it is all a matter of what you think is natural. Believing in Ocean or the Dar ul-Islam is no odder than believing in Manifest Destiny or the American Century. The trouble with most contemporary prattle about multiculturalism is that it underestimates the depth, the instinctive naturalness of cultural differences and convictions. These are not just a matter of preferring Pepsi to Coke.
Or preferring neither. A friend recently recalled that when he lived in Spain he felt no need for either cola, indeed found it quite natural to take with his meals a genial red wine called Penascal. He and I proceeded to share a bottle. I liked it so well I bought one for myself—on this shore of Ocean I found the price varies wildly from $5 to $12. This is robust drinking, made mostly from the fruity Tempranillo grape, the variety from which they make the famous wines of Rioja. Tempranillo is known in Portugal as Tinta Roriz and is one of the constituents of port, so the color of Penascal is, as you would expect, a hearty deep red. Our ancestors called such wines Tent, from tinto (“colored”), to distinguish them from the paler, clearer clarets of Bordeaux.
Penascal has a strong, oaky center—from the barrels it is matured in—but stops short of being unbalanced, harsh, or intrusive. It comes from the broad dry upland of Leon and Castile, whose northern steppes were traversed by pilgrims. The river Duero cuts through to the south (becoming the Douro—of port fame—once it has flowed west into Portugal), and it is in this river valley that Penascal has its origin, though it does not actually have the appellation Ribera del Duero.
It stands up well to strong flavors, to garlic or paella or sharp or stinky cheese. I made the mistake of chomping on a red pepper while sipping some Penascal and found that the first half of the taste (the fruity bit before the oaky flavor) was still discernible, before the pepper burst into fresh flames on my tongue. This is an experiment you need not repeat. But Penascal itself—that you could get quite used to.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply