When Spanish chef Josean Alija told his sommelier, Ismael Alvarez, that he was adding a new artichoke dish to the winter menu at Nerua, the Michelin-starred restaurant inside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Alvarez found himself in a predicament.
He had encountered "the horrible and difficult pain of (pairing with) the artichoke" in the past, and after some deliberation, found a match in De Muller Solera Moscatel from 1926, a rare vintage made to commemorate the death of architect Antonio Gaudi. It was a brilliant solution.
"The only problem was that we had only 10 bottles," he says with a laugh.