Weekly Wine Bullets (June 6)

How I Met Your Mother, Lord Huron, and my new favorite restaurant

Happy Friday friends. Still recapping some of my Spain travels this week. Let me know what you’re drinking this weekend!

What I'm watching this week

• I've been rewatching How I Met Your Mother, alongside the new rewatch podcast from Josh Radnor (Ted Mosby) and Craig Thomas (co-creator of the show).
  
  Throughout the show, I've noticed anytime they drink wine it's always a bottle of Clos du Val, the historic Napa Valley estate. I've also seen Clos du Val pop up in other shows and movies — Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Sopranos, and Everybody Loves Raymond. Surely this couldn't be a coincidence. So I went down the rabbit hole to find out why Clos du Val seems to get more product placements than any other wine, and I found this LA Times article from 2004 that has the answer. It's simpler than you think: they give Hollywood a LOT of free wine. They don't pay for product placement — they just target Hollywood bigwig directors, prop masters, and actors with free cases of wine. And the bottles eventually end up on screen. Who knew marketing was so easy!

Best bottle I had recently

• This 2012 Remirez de Ganuza Gran Reserva, overlooking the coastal vineyards of Basque Country. Ganuza is a classic Rioja producer you should be drinking, if Rioja's your thing.

  

Best meal I had recently

• Elkano in Getaria — I am officially declaring Elkano as my favorite restaurant in the world. One complaint I have with many Michelin Star and fine-dining restaurants is that while the flavors are incredible, the service feels too stiff and impersonal. In their effort to make you feel like royalty — attending to you with a small army of servers anticipating your every need — they lose sight of the warmth and human connection that can make a meal so memorable.
  
  Elkano found the right balance. Truly some of the best seafood I've ever had, served by a team who was friendly, down-to-earth, and did everything they could to make you forget you were in a Michelin-starred white-tablecloth restaurant by reiterating their unofficial motto "we're in your house".
  
  We loved it so much, we asked to come back the next day, and were so honored they fit us in considering the next available reservation was mid-November. We'll be back for a third meal someday.

Cork Beats (wine+music pairings)

• This Dunn Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon, paired with the Lonesome Dreams album by Lord Huron. This album is Western/Americana at its best, and there’s no better pairing with this than a wine made by the legendary Randy Dunn, a cowboy/farmer/dirt-loving hippie at heart, making some of the best wines in Napa Valley.

  

Cellar I explored

• I enjoyed exploring the famous wine cellar of Rekondo restaurant in San Sebastián. They have around 75,000 bottles, including these really old Lopez de Heredia wines dating back to the 1960's.