Eating and drinking — Spanish style

The Gran Orden de Caballeros is a group that exists to promote Spanish wines in the UK market and new members are nominated annually by existing Caballeros. The nominees are welcomed into the fold at the dinner before everyone gets down to the serious business of eating and drinking.

In other words, the whole thing is an excuse to have a bit of a knees-up to celebrate Spanish wines and to see the elected Caballeros (including John Radford, Tim Atkin MW, Charles Metcalfe and others) donning some remarkably silly hats and long red capes. It's all fantastic fun.

I have to admit that flying solo, as I was, the evening didn't get off to the best start. My first conversation was with a Home Counties property developer (who looked like he should still have been at school) who needed to work on his conversational skills. After teasing a series of monosyllabic answers from him, he finally asked me what I did. "I'm a wine writer". "Oh . . . um . . . so, do you like wine?"

I was rescued by my good friends from Wines from Spain and shown to my seat. I couldn't have been in better company. My Anglo-Spanish table of wine-makers, chefs and PR folk lived for food and wine. There was no stilted conversation here; this was non-stop eating, drinking and talking.

We'd already worked our way through a glass (or two) of cava and a splash of sherry before a starter of fish with saffron rice arrived. It was served with two glasses of white. The first was an albariño and the second a sauvignon blanc and verdejo blend. The chat was typically fiery. Was there too much saffron in the rice? (consensus: yes!) And, could either of the wines carry it? (consensus: no!). What then would we want to drink with a saffron rice dish? The conversation flitted between Spanish and English and it got progressively louder as the waiters passed by with yet more refills.

In the end we couldn't agree on a specific wine but we did reach agreement that the intensity of the saffron needed an altogether richer and more powerful white.

From there we moved on to beef and foie gras with mushrooms and another duo of wines.

The beef, I have to tell you, was incredible given that some 300 people were all being fed at the same time. The chefs were unanimous in their verdict that it had been perfectly cooked while the rest of us were too busy eating to be making any sensible contributions to the conversation.

The red wines that came with the meat course were a slightly odd choice.

The first was a fresh, light tempranillo that was perfectly acceptable but no match for the strength of flavours on the plate. What it did do though was unite my Spanish table-mates in the view that tempranillo is the grape variety that makes them all think of home.

They drink it when they are home sick, they are cold and for pure pleasure. They each reckoned they could smell it at a hundred yards and, as the glasses piled up in front of us and the evening went on I was impressed with how many of them kept going back to their beloved tempranillo. The second red was a Ribera del Duero that was, for me, heavy-handed on the oak and lacking in finesse. It didn't have many fans round the table either.

Most of the table were excited about the cheese course before the starters were served and there was excited applause and greedy giggles when the plates came out. We thought that the Reserva Rioja that came with the cheese was lovely but given the diversity of cheese that it was supposed to match, there was no chance that it was going to complement them all.

In the end the cheese and the lusciously sweet pudding seemed to merge into one course as we struggled to get through it all. Happily, a fantastically rich Ximénez came with desert and it was a sterling match for the blue cheese.

Whatever purpose the Caballeros may have, the evening for me was a wonderful demonstration of all that is good about the Spanish wine and food culture and the enormous pleasure that they get from it.

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