The Riojan harvest dessert: firm pears simmered whole in red Rioja with sugar, cinnamon, and lemon peel until they turn the colour of the wine, served cold in their own syrup
Origin: Rincón de Soto & La Rioja, Spain
From the journey of Pear.
Peras al vino, pears cooked in red wine, is the dessert of La Rioja, the stretch of the Ebro valley where Spain's best-known red wine and one of its best pears are grown side by side. It is a dish of the vendimia, the autumn harvest, when both the new wine and the fruit are to hand, and it is as plain as its name: whole pears, peeled and simmered with wine, sugar, cinnamon, and lemon peel until the flesh is tender and stained through to garnet, then left to cool in a syrup reduced from the cooking wine. The pears have a pedigree of their own. The Rincón de Soto pear, grown on the low river terraces of the Ebro and its tributaries in La Rioja Baja, has been cultivated there since at least the seventeenth century, and it was the first Spanish fruit to be given a protected designation of origin. The designation covers the Blanquilla and, now above all, the Conference, and its fruit is recognisable by the rough brown russeting that the valley's autumn fogs leave on the skin. Riojan cooks will say that peras al vino are made with those pears and a crianza from up the road; any firm pear will do, but the pairing is the point. How old the dish is cannot be fixed. It is often said to date from at least the sixteenth century, as a way of using up surplus wine and fruit, and poaching fruit in spiced wine is certainly an old habit of the whole Mediterranean, but the claim rests on tradition rather than on a dated Riojan recipe. The habit travelled. Spanish and Italian settlers carried it to the orchards of Argentina's Río Negro valley, where, made with Malbec, it became peras al Malbec.
Rincón de Soto pears are sold with a numbered DOP label. Conference pears are the nearest substitute outside Spain. Some Riojan cooks add a clove or a strip of orange peel, and some finish the syrup with a spoonful of brandy. The pears keep for three days in their syrup in the fridge and improve on the second.
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