A long time friend and former co-worker happened to be in town for the day and was available for lunch, so we met up at nel Centro, an Italian restaurant in downtown Portland we'd both been wanting to try.
Nel Centro is a bright, open, airy space with a lively lunchtime vibe. For all its popularity, though, it's easy on the ears and even when packed allows sufficient quiet for reminiscing conversations at a moderate tone.
The food was delicious too. We shared a mussels appetizer, with big, fat, juicy mussels steamed in a cream and Pastis-scented sauce. Lovely fresh flavor to the mussels, and the sauce was good enough to be mopped up assiduously with the slabs of char-singed fresh bread.
For mains we each ordered pasta; for my friend a gorgeous fettucine frutti di mare with fat, glossy, sauteed scallops leading the frutti parade. Since the bowl was squeaky clean and polished when he finished, I'm assuming he enjoyed it.
My dish was a Piedmontese-style ragu on tagliatelle. The tagliatielle was perfectly al dente (I hate soggy pasta) and loaded with a rich, meaty abundance of veal ragu, with more focus on the meat than the tomato sauce. A hearty dish for a hot day, but I managed to devour it without any difficulty.
We did have a problem, however, with the wine I selected. I'd not had this particular producer before, but had heard good things about it (it's a Vaynerchuck rave wine, apparently). The trouble was, the 2008 version of the Tericino Greco di Tufo from Campania was so totally shrill and shrieking with acidity as to be almost undrinkable.
Side Note and Minor Rant: When the bottle arrived our young waitress, obviously not handy or familiar with a cork, managed to commit the trivial sin of trying to leverage the cork out at an angle, and broke it about halfway through. She had to leave, get someone else to extricate the remainder of the cork, and return to serve the wine. Restaurant Managers, it's not that difficult or time-consuming to teach your servers how to pull a cork out of a bottle! Makes you look bad, and it's something that can be fixed with a little good management and a bit of training.
Right now, there's no balance whatsoever to the wine---it's totally closed, and only reluctantly yields the smallest grudge of floral/nutty aromatics, which should be a characteristic of this grape from this region. The acidity pretty much obliterates everything.
My friend and I toyed with our glasses for a long time, hoping that something would emerge. The wine simply wasn't very enjoyable because of its dominating one-note shrieking cider apple hardness.
Fortunately, the food softened it up just enough to be palatable, and brought out those begrudged almond aromas at last. If ever a wine needed a food, this one did.
With a little research I discovered the Toricino family is enormously proud of their old gnarled ancient vines on the Greco and Lapio slopes of Vesuvius, and that they are highly regarded for the quality and intensity of what they grow. That may be, and this particular wine may eventually grow into a lovely representative of its terroir and variety---but it isn't now, and won't be for a good while. It was only at the very end of our two hour lunch that it gave up any hint of pleasure.
So, if you have any....put it away for a while. Don't be in a rush to tackle it. Unless you like hard apple cider or want to use it as a vinaigrette.