Staying in is a Lot Easier When Spain Does the Catering

Foodies delight in Spanish wines and delicacies as online orders skyrocket.

When panicked shoppers began emptying supermarket shelves this spring, Brandon Schantz, a lawyer in Orange County, Calif., bypassed at least some of the lines. Instead, he went to The Spanish Table website and ordered a case of wine — whites mainly from Spain’s Catalonia and Basque regions, reds from Rioja and Castile and León — and a stockpile of conservas, artisanal canned seafood predominantly sourced from the country’s northern coast.

“Spain is producing some of the most exciting and vibrant wines these days,” says Mr. Schantz, who first became enamored by Spanish culture and cuisine while studying in Madrid during the mid-aughts. And as for those flavorful tins of fish, he says, “People flock to bars around Spain that make tapas or pintxos — small plates — solely based on the seafood that they’re taking out of these cans.”

According to Tanya Booth, who owns the Bay Area-based Spanish Table (there are three brick-and-mortar locations) with her husband, Andy, online sales at the beginning of the pandemic were three times what they usually see in their busiest month, December. What have been top sellers? Richly marbled jamón Ibérico cured from prized black-hoofed pigs that graze on acorns in the vast Dehesa agroforests. A broad range of intensely flavored extra virgin olive oils, such as the phenol-rich Picual and the delicate Arbequina varietals. Protected Designation of Origin Sherry vinegars. Manchego cheeses. Cookbooks. “And we sold a lot of canned seafood, stacks and stacks of it,” she says.

Other online purveyors of gourmet Spanish goods, in the United States and Canada, saw similar surges. In Williamsburg, Va., La Tienda, the oldest and largest of the e-commerce retailers, watched its numbers more than triple, with new customers making up 40 percent of sales. For the shop at New York’s Mercado Little Spain, the 35,000-square-foot, all-day Spanish-dining mecca created by the chefs José Andrés and Albert and Ferran Adrià, the initial increase in sales was 80 percent over the prior year’s period, fueled by paella kits for enthusiastic homecooks. SolFarmers, which offers retail and wholesale from Ottawa, continues to see solid growth, particularly with canned sardines and truffle potato chips. And Despaña, which began as a chorizo factory in Queens, N.Y., before expanding to a SoHo tapas cafe and grocery, as well as a wine shop, fielded an upswing in internet orders, many from its core Manhattan regulars after the downtown locations had been forced to temporarily close….Read more

Source: The New York Times, https://nyti.ms/35iMn8A