Martilde at Mare in Boston's North End
Posted 03/17/2008 at 11:44 AM by Cathy
For the servers, hosts, bussers and cooks of participating restaurants, Restaurant Week in Boston is a nightmare.
“It’s like Saturday night every night,” our host at Mare said last night. Think about your busiest five-hour stretch of your week, then multiply it for ten days straight, and you’ve got some sense of what it’s like to staff Restaurant Week.
But – and this is the big but – it’s good for business. So hosts host, servers serve, cooks cook, and diners are fortunate to dine.
And to drink.
Mare features a fish-focused menu to pair, it seemed to me, with its fishbowl-like position on the corner of Richmond Street in the North End. Knee-to-ceiling windows wrap around the two street-facing sides of the restaurant, and diners are treated to the sights of one of Boston’s richest neighborhoods for culture and atmosphere.
When I think of Italian wines made by women, I immediately think of wines by Maria Abbona – I’d tried her 2000 Langhe Rosso and would gladly try it again, or anything else made by her for that matter. I’d have no such luck at Mare though; her wines didn’t make the list.
Our server didn’t know what other wines on the list were made by women, but he asked the host who was swinging by our table just then. “The Martilde,” she answered immediately, referring to the 2005 Barbera Oltrepo Pavese (Lombardia) by A.A. Martilde. “The label has pictures of her cats.”
It’s a gift to have a visual memory like that, but I have to believe that if our host would taste this wine she wouldn’t forget the taste memory either. The wine is incredibly smooth and so pleasant that I was almost sorry when the food arrived. The food was lovely – especially the dessert of tortino di ricotta with coconut gelato – but I’d have been perfectly glad to sip that particular glass of wine on its own all night long. It was so well-balanced, I barely sensed the tannins or even the alcohol.
With two sips left in the glass I took a good look at the color of the wine against the white tablecloth backdrop: deep violet, with a rim that’s nearly transparent, and a core that’s deep maroon. Even the tones of the wine were balanced, like a portrait artist’s palette.
By the glass, by the bottle, whatever. I’ll keep an eye out for Martilde’s wine from now on.
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About the Author
Cathy Huyghe
Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.
Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.
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