I may not be particularly religious, but I believe in peaches and in Penedès, my beliefs are strong.
If a partaker of the fermented grape, then the name Penedès will be familiar as a wine land. Any drive along the main highway west of Barcelona or a trip on the highspeed AVE train will take you across their sea of seemingly endless vines. They sway in the evening breezes and shimmer in the potent Mediterranean sun. They seem able to only produce fine fruits when allowed this masochistic existence that Catalunya offers in bountiful quantity.
But grapes are not the only fruits to be found in these lands. Somehow, peaches or préssecs in Catalan, have managed to find space amongst the vines. If you look at the massive vineyard statistics for the region, it seems impossible. I’d never have believed it myself were it not for the fact I joined a group of city dwellers back in 2012 to go out and pick these peaches from the trees in what was a very early ‘influencer’ press trip near the village of Sant Pau d’Ordal, the succulent heart of Penedès peach country.
As I’m originally from orange country, I don’t really know a damned thing about peaches other than the fact I love to eat them. Given this, I picked what seemed to have the best color. Upon arriving home, I found them to all be hard as a rock. In expressing my surprise, the organizer laughed and said that I needed to wait for them to ripen, apparently in the same manner as with avocados–also a fruit of my native lands.
Leaving them out in my Barcelona apartment kitchen, they did indeed mature rapidly, filling the air with this sweet perfume that rivals that of orange blossoms but yet is somehow more dear as peach season seems like it’s a great deal shorter than that of oranges.
I only buy my fruits when they’re locally in season, with the slight exception of strawberries. Somehow, down in Huelva in the south of Spain or up in Carpentras in the south of France, they’re able to ripen them via greenhouses of a sort, two months earlier than the normal season at the end of May. But peaches, well, they need trees and thus I only buy them in June and maybe July.
I was going up to Penedès for an evening event the previous week and as it is peach season, a detour to the village of Sant Pau d’Ordal was very much needed. The fact it’s a peach epicenter is no mystery when you arrive as seemingly every other house has a sign for ‘préssecs’ along with a small table out front. You see a similar offer for cherries down in the villages along the Ebre River this time of year as well, but they don’t have what Sant Pau has, which is a market on the main square each weekend, just for the local peaches.
My arrival was sadly too late for the local market or family shops so I needed to go to a shop that I’ve been to before. I always feel like they stiff me on the price as my face resembles nothing of a local origin. But, in looking up the prices later, they seemed to be in line with the 3.50/4€ a kilo price and the guy tossed in 2kg of apricots for free as well.
When I arrived home after the event, car heavily en-peached, I was tired and left the whole tray out on the counter as I couldn’t be bothered to make space in the fridge. Upon waking up the next morning to take out the dogs, when I walked into the kitchen, there was that beautiful tidal wave of peach perfume that crashed down upon me. Wondrous and exotic, I grabbed the most ripe peach I could and devoured it while one of the dogs kept jumping upon me to go out.
The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson is credited with saying, “There are only 10 minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.” I know this not because I’m fancy or studied English literature, but because there was a fruit delivery truck that had it painted on the side which made the route through my neighborhood when I lived in San Francisco.
It clearly rings true given that it’s stuck with me all this time and perhaps it is the case with pears. But with peaches, it seems you have a slightly larger window. There is however still a window when you happen upon the sensation like that first peach in the morning which is, a profound religious experience.
Everything about the perfect peach saturates all the senses from seeing such a perfect fruit, to that beautiful perfume, to the rounded, opulent taste, to the sensation of the broad, perfect flesh of the fruit, to even the sound of biting into such a wonderful gift of nature.
The fellow at the shop said, “Don’t keep them in the fridge so that they ripen” except that when you buy several kilos, you need to keep them in the fridge lest you end up needing to have a peach feeding orgy given that they’re all ripe at the same time. The advantage of this is that you can dole out 4-5 a day and enjoy them over time as the season is but a fleeting moment in the year.
Of course I got to thinking about the other fine product of where these peaches are from, the wine. What would one drink with such wonderful peaches if one was to drink anything? The pairing purists out there would scream, “Dessert wine! Probably a Moscatell!” and leave it at that, but it’s so reductive and final. There is no reason to have anything sweeter with such an entity as a peach from Sant Pau d’Ordal.
I place my pairing wager on the Xarel·lo (cha-rel-lu) wines of Penedès. Why? Because they work to complement the peaches, not fight them. There’s structure and acidity and plenty of fine aromas to the Xarel·lo wines, but they’re not the least bit interested in competing. And, one of the big things that’s different with Xarel·lo rather than say Godello (another excellent white from the other side of Spain) is that Xarel·lo can often have something of a lightness to the middle of it which makes for a space that these peaches can fill in perfectly, at least when ripe.
Maybe it seems crazy. Maybe it seems like I need to go back to Pairing Academy if such a thing were to unfortunately exist and I say that as usually, “something great to eat” + “something great to drink” = “something also great”. If you don’t believe me, go pick up some peaches (my sympathies is you’re not near Sant Pau, but fine peaches do abound in the world) and a Xarel·lo, such as one of those below, and see if you too can reach such a wonderful experience during these hot days of summer.
